A 22-year-old Chinese student in France, who was supposed to be starting a master's degree in anthropology at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, has not returned from a summer visit to her family in Changsha, China.

Zhang Yadi has been missing while in Shangri-La, Yunnan, since 30 July. Several sources report that police officers took her away on charges of “endangering national security” after they discovered that she was @TaraFreesoul, one of the promoters of CYS4T – Chinese Youths Stand for Tibet, a group of students who took up Tibet's cause abroad beginning in May 2024, exposing its "hidden truth" in Chinese diaspora communities.

Zhang is one of the new faces of China’s dissident community, a member of the white sheet generation, a protest movement that came out in the open with anger over the extremely strict zero COVID-19 policy imposed during the pandemic.

She is also a sad confirmation of how widespread is the control imposed by Xi Jinping in the name of the "great renewal of the Chinese nation” even outside China, among young people studying and working in the West.

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Just a few days ago, @Tarafreesoul posted the following on her X profile:

“The history of the ethnic groups of southwestern China is a bloody history of colonisation, brainwashing, slavery, intermarriage, and assimilation of the indigenous population by the Han people.

“Behind the slogan ‘building a strong Chinese national community’ lies the blood and tears of various ethnic groups. Their culture has been repressed and disappeared, their native language has been silenced and disappeared, and their history cannot be written by their own people.

“Everything is lightly masked by the four characters of 'Chinese nation,' as if nothing had happened, as if this land had been part of the Chinese Empire since ancient times.”

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On 5 July, Zhang returned to Changsha to visit her family. Before she went missing on 30 July, she had been in close contact with friends and family, but then all communication abruptly ceased.

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