ABSTRACT

This article investigates the Beijing Olympics as an event that incited people in the contemporary international community to talk about ‘human rights’, and to engage in the discursive proliferation of human rights. China experienced three waves of this discursive proliferation of human rights in 2008: firstly, through anger at foreigners over Tibet and the torch relay; secondly, in grief after the Sichuan earthquake, and thirdly, in pride at the successful games. Certain conceptions of human rights were brought to the fore during these three periods of time. This article aims to study the competing discourses over human rights among different political forces, such as international human rights groups, pro-Tibetan Independence groups, and the Chinese government. All of them speak, or appear to be speaking, of one and the same thing: the ‘human rights’. Things being said in turn underpin the production of particular conceptions of ‘human rights’.