Details of the Case and Biography of Wuhan Citizen Zhang Yi, Arrested in Tibet

On July 21, 2026, this website learned of the details of the case and biography of Wuhan citizen Zhang Yi, who was arrested in Tibet, and hereby reports as follows:

Zhang Yi: Born in 1968, a native of Wuhan, Hubei Province; a Wuhan student leader during the “1989 student movement,” a pro-democracy dissident, former volunteer with the Wuhan Mutual Aid Association (group), rights-protection citizen, human rights defender, and Chinese political prisoner currently in detention.

In 1989, he was a student in the Law Department of Wuhan University. Because he participated in the “1989 student movement” and was one of the student leaders in the Wuhan area, he was subsequently arrested by the authorities, sentenced to two years for “the crime of gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic order,” and sent to Hongshan Prison to serve his sentence; he suffered brutal torture in prison, resulting in permanent deafness in one ear; after his release, because he continued to uphold dissenting views and had for many years persisted in commemorating “June 4” and defending citizens’ rights, he was designated by the Wuhan authorities as a key target for stability-maintenance surveillance;

In June 2018, he was detained by Wuhan police for distributing photos of “Liu Xiaobo’s cenotaph” online and planning related commemorative activities; on December 30 of the same year, because he refused to cooperate with the “stability-maintenance demands” made by public security “national security” personnel, he was violently intercepted and beaten by Wuhan’s Dongxihu District police and officers from the Changqing Huayuan police station, acting jointly, at the entrance to the parking lot beside the “Luo Yutou” restaurant on Lanjiang Road in Wuhan’s Hanyang District;

During the spread of the novel coronavirus epidemic in 2020, because he was a volunteer with the Wuhan Mutual Aid Association (group), and in keeping with the group’s aim of providing assistance to the families of Wuhan’s victims, he bravely gave multiple interviews to foreign media and actively called for the rescue of Fang Bin (Fang Bin (CPPC No. 00868), who was secretly sentenced to three years for filming videos showing the number of deaths in hospitals during the novel coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan), and voiced support for people such as Zhang Hai, a rights-defending family member who had been arrested. As a result, he was warned, reprimanded, and threatened by police more than ten times. The Wuhan authorities even sought to collect information on him and frame him for “financial fraud” in order to silence him; during this period, his son Zhang Hongyuan also faced the risk of arrest because he helped his father give interviews to foreign media and filmed videos of public protests against the lockdown, forcing his son to leave China alone in April 2023 and travel to the Netherlands to seek political asylum;

In June 2026, he planned to travel to Tibet and Xinjiang, but the Exit-Entry Administration refused to issue him a border pass. After he repeatedly negotiated with them, he was ultimately allowed to travel; on July 1, 2026, while he and his younger brother Zhang Xuan were traveling in Lhasa, both were suddenly taken away by police from Lhasa’s Chengguan District; his younger brother was released after giving a statement at the police station, but he was placed under administrative detention for 15 days. The alleged reason for the offense was that, while visiting Sera Monastery, he wanted to borrow a prostration mat from a Tibetan person, but because of the language barrier, he showed the other person a photo of the Dalai Lama on his mobile phone; unexpectedly, the police learned of this and quickly took him away; on July 18, the 17th day of his detention, his younger brother received a call from Lhasa police saying that he had been criminally detained on suspicion of “incitement,” asking the family to transfer living expenses to him, and saying that a detention notice would be mailed to his family home in Wuhan a few days later; as of now, the specific offense of which he is suspected and the place where he is being held remain unknown; outside observers suspect that his sudden arrest may be related to the fact that July 1, 2026, was precisely the first day the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law came into force, while his family fears that he may well become a target of the authorities’ “strict crackdown” as the new law takes effect. His current place of detention is unknown.