08/19/2026
On 1 July, retired Wuhan activist Zhang Yi (张毅) was visiting Sera Monastery in Lhasa when he tried to speak with a Tibetan woman who did not know Mandarin. He showed her a photo of a Han Chinese Buddhist monk standing beside the Dalai Lama, and she immediately looked away.
Minutes later, Zhang was detained. On July 18, he was placed in criminal detention on suspicion of “inciting separatism,” and his arrest was later approved.
This alleged act of incitement was not a speech, protest, publication, or attempt to persuade anyone to support Tibetan independence. It was showing a photo. The charge of “separatism” has become extraordinarily elastic in Tibet, now broad enough to criminalize not only political organizing, but religious symbolism, private communication, and ordinary human contact.
The woman’s fear is also telling. She understood that merely looking at the wrong image was dangerous. Repression is most effective when it does not require police at every interaction, but instead causes people to police themselves.
For Zhang’s son, Zhang Hongyuan (张宏远), now in the Netherlands, this arrest follows decades of pressure on his family. Zhang Yi was imprisoned after participating in protests in Wuhan following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and later endured surveillance, repeated summons, and detention for continuing to associate with civil-society figures and political prisoners.
His son admits that, growing up, he sometimes resented him. While other fathers concentrated on their careers and home lives, Zhang Yi kept getting involved in the suffering of others, even when the resulting repression damaged his family’s security. Only later did Zhang Hongyuan understand his father’s refusal to do nothing. As he put it, “many people only realize that someone has always been resisting on their behalf when the iron fist finally smashes into their own interests.”
Read more about the Story of Zhang Yi and His Son, from 1989 to today, on our Substack — Link in Bio
