‘We are here, but not really here’: disabled students’ experiences of visibility and erasure in Chinese university classrooms

Although disabled students' university enrolment in China has increased, their classroom experiences remain under-examined. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with fourteen disabled students at three institutionally diverse Chinese universities, this study examines visibility and erasure as interconnected mechanisms of inclusive exclusion, whereby formal presence coexists with substantive marginalisation. Informed by Critical Disability Studies, Ahmed's phenomenology of orientation, Strayhorn's belonging framework, and Yuval-Davis's politics of belonging, the analysis identifies three themes: hyper-visibility, which marks students as problems rather than learners; pedagogical erasure, which excludes them from intellectual participation; and the negotiation of presence, which requires students to expend affective labour managing conditions institutions should transform. The findings challenge conceptualisations of inclusion that equate access with participation and call for inclusive pedagogy oriented towards epistemic belonging rather than administrative accommodation.