Chinese Student Zhang Yadi Detained for Tibet Advocacy

Earlier this month, vigils and tributes were held in the various Western cities that the Chinese dissident diaspora has made home—in London and Paris and others. They were held for Zhang Yadi, a Chinese student who vanished into police custody over the summer. Like so many of those detained by the Communist Party, Zhang represents the best of China, the country’s wisest voices: those who should rightly be the nation’s thought leaders. And while her case is a tragedy, her existence is a miracle.

After decades of the fiercest brainwashing administered by a totalitarian regime that is every bit as extreme as its Soviet predecessor, China continues to produce Zhang Yadis—individuals who hear and absorb the same information as their classmates, but later reject it, having grown and changed in ways that baffle the authorities. We might view them as pioneers who are giving us a glimpse of China’s brightest possible future.

Zhang, who used the nom de plume Tara Freesoul, had been living in France since 2022, where she studied at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris. In 2024, she won a scholarship for a Master’s in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and her course was due to begin in September. On 5 July, she returned from France to China to visit her family. There, she was apprehended in Shangri-La by state security authorities. Zhang was taken back to her home city of Changsha, where she has been held ever since at the National Security Bureau Detention Centre, suspected of “inciting separatism.”

If convicted under Article 103 of China’s Criminal Law, she could face ten years in prison. And like all political prisoners in China, she has no hope of serious legal representation. Somehow, the country’s human-rights lawyers carry on in the face of this hopelessness: on 16 September, Jiang Tianyong met Zhang’s mother at a Changsha coffee shop to discuss providing legal assistance. Plainclothes police interrupted their meeting and took him away.

Zhang had turned to traditional spirituality as an adolescent, unsatisfied with the thin gruel of that newer religion Marxism-Leninism. For her, the answers lay in Tibetan Buddhism. And one cannot explore Tibetan Buddhism for long without becoming aware of the Communist Party’s role in the religion’s recent history. Zhang learned about CCP oppression, her doubts slowly growing, until one day in February 2022 when those historical crimes began forcing their way with bright vivid horror into a teenager’s world of crushes and pop idols. With disbelief, she read the news that Tibetan singer and TV celebrity Tsewang Norbu had burned himself alive outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Past became present, political became personal, and Tara Freesoul was born.

After arriving in France later that year, Zhang began publishing work with Chinese Youth Stand For Tibet (CYS4T), one of the many digital platforms that had emerged in the wake of the White Paper Revolution. Fluent in Mandarin, Tibetan, French, and English, she had much to contribute. She wrote history, ecology, and carefully-researched refutations of CCP propaganda.

Contrary to the charge she now faces, Zhang did not advocate separatism (those who do will hardly risk returning to China). Rather, she appears to have advocated dialogue. “We are committed,” CYS4T proclaims on Substack, to “understand[ing] Tibetan culture, deconstructing Han nationalist ideology, resolving ethnic antagonism and hatred, and promoting the transformation of ethnic issues into justice and reconciliation.”

Beijing sees much to fear in these goals. For the CCP, Tibetan culture merits no deep understanding, but rather a gradual ingestion by its coloniser, leaving behind only a desiccated husk: the tourism industry. Already, millions of Chinese travel every year to the monasteries and nomad camps and costume shops of Lhasa and Shangri-La, where they photograph each other cosplaying as “authentic Tibetans,” living out a romanticised ideal.

“Sometimes, I just want to be someone else,” a work-stressed graphic designer from Hangzhou told journalist Judith Hertog. “Today, I am Drolma, a Tibetan girl who is free and joyful and lives without care.” This is the Tibet that the CCP would have Chinese citizens believe in—a giant theme park (with a Chinese owner) where office drones can unwind. The Tibetans themselves are painted as a simple and traditional people leading a slow life up in the mountains, eternally grateful to their liberator in Beijing.

Greater public awareness would lead to the dawning realisation for many people that Tibet represents, by almost any metric, a separate civilisation. It is hardly just another Chinese province. The Communist Party would also prefer to keep a thick veil of darkness over its own seven-decade terror campaign against the Tibetan people. It would be safer for those crimes to remain obscured. (In my own experience, it’s striking just how ignorant many Chinese are about Tibetan suffering, but it’s equally striking how quickly some of them will reject Party propaganda when confronted with good evidence.)

Tibet’s Long Fight for Freedom

Not unlike Hong Kong’s frontline protesters in 2019, with their street battles and Molotov cocktails, some Tibetans have realised they live in a time that calls for truly desperate measures.

Perhaps most significantly, Beijing will be alarmed at the prospect of ordinary people “resolving ethnic antagonism and hatred.” As we browse the work of Tara Freesoul, we find certain themes woven through the politics, revealing her personal philosophy. At one point she refers to a love that breaks through racial barriers; at another she appeals to the interconnectedness of all human beings and all nature. Hers is a world of greater communication and clarity, more light in the dark; a world in which the obstacles that restrict understanding are surmounted. And understanding one another also means understanding and preserving the distinctions that mark our human variety.

I’m reminded of an old remark by Polish dissident Leszek Kołakowski, when describing the situation in the Soviet Union: “Each citizen, in all his relations with the state, faced the omnipotent apparatus alone, an isolated and powerless individual.” The Chinese Communist Party was a Soviet project from the very beginning (formed in 1921 under the direct guidance of Comintern official Grigori Voitinsky), and while some things have changed over the past century, others have not. Like its Soviet master, the CCP would atomise society. It wants each citizen standing alone in the dark, with the Communist Party their only recourse—their saviour and tormentor. When Chinese and Tibetans begin talking deeply and frankly to one another without turning to the Party for guidance, then the Party risks the exposure of its lies, and that means the weakening of its psychic hold over the nation.

Xi Jinping appears increasingly panicked by this prospect. A new draft law was submitted to China’s legislature last month, prohibiting acts that “damage ethnic unity” (those familiar with the CCP may have some idea of just how widely such a definition can and will be stretched). The law requires parents to teach children that “all ethnic groups of the Chinese nation are one family.” The meaning of this anodyne language, of course, is total conformity and submission to the head of the family—Beijing. Article 61 expands the law to all corners of the world, including Tara Freesoul’s adopted country France: “organisations and individuals outside the territory of the People’s Republic of China” that “undermine national unity and progress or incite ethnic division” will be held “legally accountable.”

Tibet is a particular focus of this kind of legislation. Pressure is mounting for Western institutions not to call it “Tibet” at all, but rather the Chinese colonial name, “Xizang.” Two Paris museums recently gave in to the pressure: one later backtracked, the other did not. (Chinese authorities also insisted that a Nantes museum bowdlerise its Mongolian exhibition, removing such terms as “Genghis Khan,” “empire,” and yes, even “Mongol.” Beijing’s preferred narrative subsumes Mongolian history into Chinese history; meanwhile “empire” is not a comfortable association for a Marxist-Leninist organisation.)

Tara Freesoul had been moving in the opposite direction to the Communist Party, choosing to highlight Tibet’s distinctiveness at the very moment the authorities were stepping up their campaign to obliterate it. And the timing of her arrest may also be connected to recent comments from the Dalai Lama. Just weeks earlier, he had used the occasion of his 90th birthday to declare that all authority to locate his successor rests solely with his inner circle. “No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter,” he said. This was a clear snub to the CCP, which seeks to fill the role with a compliant puppet. The CCP evidently felt it needed to make a strong statement in response, and an example has now been made of one unfortunate student.

For those Chinese who take part in dissident activity while working or studying overseas, deciding whether or not to return home is an agonising choice. Some do so without consequence; others are greeted by a rabble of police thugs when they step off the plane. It’s a gamble. Zhang Yadi seems to have decided that the gamble was worth it; that she would probably be okay. “I don’t think she expected this heavy charge,” says one of her CYST colleagues, “because we are not advocating for separatism.”

I’ve met individuals who had weighed the cost in the same way, and arrived at the same conclusion. They hadn’t done much activism, they’d often worn a mask at public events, and besides, there were family members in China whom they needed to visit. So they risked a return—the heaviest of wagers, unimaginable to most of us—and thankfully got away with it.

The CCP will hope Zhang Yadi’s fate serves as a warning to those who share her ambition. But the White Paper generation is unlikely to be silenced. China will keep birthing Zhang Yadis, for reasons far beyond the government’s narrow grasp of human psychology. And while many now languish in the nation’s detention rooms and prison cells, others are already taking inspiration from them.