To “Dance with Lost Souls”: Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and the Contested Rhetorics of Democracy and Human Rights in China

This essay addresses China’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08, as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnational ideals of justice crash into nation states committed to local rather than global forms of governance. Such rhetorical concerns are tempered by China’s increasing dominance of global markets, meaning this essay also studies the complicated relationships among local activists, international justice movements, and neoliberal capitalism. The essay therefore maps how China marshals the rhetoric of globalization to enter new markets even as it deploys the rhetoric of nationalism to block foreign influence. Nonetheless, Charter 08’s prophetic rhetoric and Liu’s heroic charisma have struck a chord internationally, thus opening a new chapter in the movement to call upon globalizing human rights in the name of building democracy in China.