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.