If the opening ceremony for last month’s Olympic Games in Beijing was struck by controversy after it was discovered that the beautiful young girl who “sang” to billions was miming to the sound of another girl, whose face did not fit, the opening ceremony of the Paralympics today poses even bigger questions for the Chinese organisers.

Will there be a diversity of disabilities represented? In the Olympics ceremony, the 56 children who organisers claimed came from the 56 ethnic groups in China were from the dominant Han group. How will the complexities of spinal cord injuries, amputations, cerebral palsy sufferers, blindness and “les autres”, the five broad classes of the Paralympics, be portrayed?

Organisers said that while the Olympics opening ceremony featured the idea of harmony, the Paralympics ceremony would emphasise humanitarian concerns, hope and warmth.

Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed film-maker who directed the Olympics opening ceremony, is in charge of the Paralympics ceremony as well. Four hundred deaf girls will perform a sign-language dance called “Hello, Stars” and more than 2,000 young kung fu students will perform an animated robot dance.

On an executive level, the Beijing Games have been inclusive. The wheel-chair-using Deng Pufang, the founder and chairman of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF), is also executive president of the Beijing organising committee. The first son of Deng Xiaoping, China’s political leader from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Deng was paralysed at the age of 24 after falling out of a window in still unexplained circumstances while imprisoned by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Since then, Deng has had the power and influence to put disability rights on the agenda in China like no individual before him.

But others have not been so lucky. One person who has been excluded from the Paralympics is Fang Zheng. His absence is indicative of the problems of human rights rather than just disabled rights in China.

A talented athlete, Fang might have represented China at the Olympics and would have represented them at the Paralympics, but for how he lost his legs. On June 4, 1989, the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush the student rebellion and Fang’s legs in the process as he attempted to rescue a friend.

Fang, now 41, won two gold medals at the All-China Disabled Athletic Games in 1992 but was refused permission to represent China internationally, for fear that his story would embarrass the Communist regime.

If China’s right to host the 29th Olympics was questioned by many, their right to host the thirteenth Paralympics, which are bid for simultaneously and run until September 17, is even more complicated. The first Paralympic Games were held in Rome in 1960, building on the Stoke Mandeville Games of 1948. China did not send a team until 1984.

The disabled were not officially recognised in China until after the foundation of the CDPF in 1983. Between the fusion of the new socialist idealism and the old patriarchal hegemony in which a strong, healthy body equalled a strong, healthy nation, there was little room for “imperfection”.

The CDPF estimates that there are 83 million disabled people in China, as many people as in the whole of Germany. Still, critics say that this figure is unrealistically low in a country of 1.3 billion. Official figures say that Britain has ten million officially disabled people, or one sixth of the population.

But just acknowledging their existence in China represents progress. Just as the Olympics were pitched as a way of advancing human rights and equality in China, so it is hoped that the Paralympics will mark a great leap forward in disability rights.