Canyou Group founder and hemophiliac Zheng Weining believes computers and the Internet provide windows of opportunity for those living with disabilities. Huang Yuli reports in Shenzhen.

Canyou's headquarters is much the same as the other buildings in Shenzhen's Futian district, but it's employees stand out in that 90 percent of them have a disability, such as the loss of a leg or an arm, or a chronic disease.

On the entrance wall there are eight characters forming a slogan: "The more disabled you are, the more beautiful you are."

Back in 1997, when Zheng Weining founded Canyou (literally "Friends of the Disabled"), he never expected it would grow from just a few people into a high-tech group that has tens of millions of yuan in assets, 33 branch offices across the country, involved with software development, cartoons and animation, e-commerce and other ventures.

It has 3,700 employees across the country. Beside offering them jobs, it also takes care of their lives, and above all, it also serves as an incubator for more social enterprises that enable the disabled to make full use of their own special skills and strengths, gain economic independence and realize their self-worth.

Now, Canyou is recognized across the world as a successful enterprise, with its model spreading like wildfire in NGO circles.

Zheng admits that he had no idea of what a social enterprise was when he started the initiative in 1997, after attempting suicide thrice.

Born with hemophilia, he moved from his hometown of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, to ensure that he had an adequate supply of clean blood. He requires a blood transfusion every week.

Shenzhen was, at the time, the only place in China that derived blood from donations.

Thanks to his family's wealth, Zheng had never had a job before moving to Shenzhen.

Initially he felt lonely as he didn't know anyone in the city and his wife worked late most days, while his daughter went to boarding school.

He became depressed and suicidal. Then Zheng's mother gave him 300,000 yuan ($47,000) as an incentive to do something productive with his life and it was at this point that he had the idea of helping not just himself but other people who had chronic diseases, or were "handicapped" in some way or another.

He thought a computer and Internet company would be ideal.

"With computer programming the disabled have an advantage compared to 'healthy' people," Zheng claims. "For one thing, since it's not convenient for them to walk, there's fewer distractions and they are more focused.

"The computer is their world. When God closes one door he opens a window and the computer is a window for disabled people. It provides an environment in which they are more competent than in the real world."

One of Zheng's first employees was Liu Yong, who is under 1.3 meters tall and didn't finish school because of discrimination and bullying.

Zheng and his company's first employees all lived in his apartment to begin with and studied how to build websites.

In 1999, they launched the website www.2000888.com, which provides useful everyday information and forums for the disabled. It currently has more than 200,000 registered members.

In 2000, Liu Yong won fifth place at an international website making competition in Prague; and in 2003, another employee, Li Hong, won fifth place at a world programming competition in New Delhi, beating engineers from top technology companies.

Their achievements encouraged Zheng in his belief that people with disabilities could excel in the software development business.

The group grew fast and attracted talent from all over the country. In 2008, Canyou gained Capability Maturity Model Integration level-3 certification, an international award that evaluates a software enterprise's ability and maturity. In August, it passed level 5, the highest accolade.

In 2005, Li Hong, the world programming competition winner, who has muscular dystrophy and was chief engineer of Canyou, became so seriously ill he could not work.

Because he had only worked for four years at the company he was not eligible for a pension, so Zheng decided to set a new policy: All employees unable to work would receive a pension for life.

Though the rule was opposed by some of the group's management, Zheng insisted and to date a dozen former employees have benefited from the policy and received pensions.

"I am disabled and I know the disabled," Zheng says. "What they are most afraid of is not that they are poor or tired, but they have nothing to do and they don't have a sense of personal value."

In 2009, Zheng established a foundation named after himself and donated 90 percent of his shares in Canyou group and 51 percent of his shares in Canyou's branch companies to the foundation. The group comprises 33 companies.

And it not only takes care of its employees during working hours. It also provides meals, dorms with wheelchair access, psychological counseling and crisis handling - all for free.

Zheng says it costs an average of 2,700 yuan ($426) for each employee to provide such welfare options.

Additionally, if an employee's parents visit, the company management hosts a meal and provides a car so they can tour the city.

Zheng also realized that Canyou alone couldn't solve the problem of unemployment for so many people with disabilities and needed to get more people involved. So he put forth a "High-Tech Employment for the Disabled" model.

Canyou acts as an incubator for new social enterprises, providing start-up funds, branding operations and enterprise-community management models and barrier-free guarantees.

In 2011, Canyou set up a branch in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, and hired 68 disabled persons from the Uygur ethnic group. Business has boomed and the company now employs 200 people.

Zheng says this initiative has given him confidence that his model of working will succeed just about anywhere.

Canyou also has branches in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and Zheng intends to open an office in the United States.

"I believe the disabled are a fantastic human resource, since we believe that because we are disabled, we need to be more beautiful," Zheng says.

(China Daily 09/06/2012 page18)