Hello Reader,
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Happy 100^th, Margaret Thatcher — you’re having a huge week!
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Two women who openly revere the “Iron Lady” are shaking their nations’ politics. One may soon be her country’s first female Pime Minister. The other just won a Nobel. Thatcher may be gone, her legacy disputed — but her defiant spirit lives on through the women she inspired.

The Global Fight for Freedom

1. Into the Liuzhi: China's Vanishing Elite
2. Peru Delivers Another Generational Victory
3. World's Oldest Dictator Refuses to Quit
4. Georgia Shows How to Stand Up to a Dictator
5. Japanese Rocker Shatters Glass Ceiling

Country names are followed by their 2025 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
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​Note: I will be taking time off for the next week. Dispatches resume on Thursday, October 24th.

"Mr. Yu Faxin has been taken away by the discipline inspection and supervision authorities." Shanghai-listed Great Microwave Technology offered nothing more on September 22nd—no charges, no timeline, no recourse. Their CEO, a leading semiconductor scientist whose chips powered military aircraft, had vanished into “liuzhi”.
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By September's end, 39 executives from publicly traded companies had disappeared this way, according to an Economist analysis. Stock exchange filings capture only a sliver of the purge. Most targets work for private firms with no obligation to explain why their leaders never came home. Total detentions jumped nearly 50% in 2024 to over 38,000. Corruption cases are on track to hit one million this year.
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The liuzhi system runs parallel to normal law. Detainees enter windowless cells where lights never dim and guards watch them use toilets. No lawyers. No court approval required. New regulations permit eight-month holds, with clocks resetting whenever agents suspect a new crime.
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Locals call them "deep-sea fishing expeditions." Local governments bankrupted by property collapse detain executives on thin pretenses, hoping liuzhi's brutality yields confessions. Then investigators seize assets. More than half of this year's detained executives were grabbed by authorities far from their headquarters—one jurisdiction poaching another's business class for funds.
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Wang Linpeng never recovered. The Hubei department store magnate entered liuzhi in April and was freed in July. Days later, he jumped from a building—one of five prominent business suicides between April and July. "Just one of the few that float to the surface," said an anonymous lawyer. "There are many more that no one knows about."
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The terror ripples beyond executive suites. Workers threaten to jump from rooftops—cases quadrupled since 2022—demanding back wages as economic collapse drains local budgets. Freedom House logged a 45 percent surge in protest events in Q3 over the prior year, the sixth straight quarter of increases.

Gen Z has delivered another breathtaking victory. After weeks of street battles—stones and petrol bombs against tear gas and rubber bullets—Peru's youth forced Congress to act. Early Friday, lawmakers voted 124-0 to remove President Dina Boluarte from office, making her Peru's seventh leader in the past decade.
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The catalyst came Wednesday night when gunfire erupted at an Agua Marina concert, wounding five. Over 6,000 had been murdered by mid-2025. Extortion complaints are up 28%. Gangs demand protection money while police look away. For Gen Z protesters who'd been filling Lima's streets since September, the concert shooting proved Boluarte's "moral incapacity" to govern.
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Congress—where 67 of 130 members face criminal investigation—summoned Boluarte near midnight to defend herself. When she refused to appear, they impeached the woman whose approval had cratered to 2%.
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Congressional President José Jerí was sworn in as interim president immediately. But he inherits a crisis of legitimacy —aligned with the same corrupt power base that has eroded democratic accountability.
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Peru's Gen Z recognizes the truth: removing one failed leader changes nothing when the entire structure remains captured. Their rebellion was never about Boluarte alone—it was against a rotting democracy that has betrayed an entire generation. Friday's impeachment proves they're powerful enough to topple presidents. Whether they can rebuild what they've torn down remains Peru's defining question.

Paul Biya cast his ballot Sunday in Yaoundé, seeking an eighth term that would keep him in power until age 99. The man who seized control in 1982 has presided over Cameroon longer than most of the nation's 30 million citizens have been alive. Only two men have ruled since independence from France and Britain in 1960—and Cameroon has never seen a democratic transfer of power.
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The path to that independence ran through blood. When France's trusteeship ended in 1960, it came only after brutal suppression of the Union of Cameroonian Peoples—the nationalist party that demanded true sovereignty. France outlawed the UPC in 1955, then hunted its leaders. Nyobé fell to French commandos in 1958. Moumié was assassinated by French intelligence in Geneva in 1960. The following civil war claimed tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Cameroon gained nominal independence while French troops still waged counterinsurgency on its soil.
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Now Biya's regime has perfected its own methods of control. In July, electoral authorities barred Maurice Kamto—who finished second in 2018—from the ballot. The Constitutional Council upheld the ban on August 5, eliminating Biya's strongest challenger. Human Rights Watch called it a move that "buries what remains of Cameroon's democracy."
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Discussion of Biya's health—he disappeared for 42 days last year—is banned. He’s spent over four years in Switzerland since taking power, allegedly for medical treatment, while his country deteriorates. Poverty has surged. Teachers strike over unpaid wages. An Anglophone separatist war has killed thousands and displaced 180,000 since 2017.
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Results are expected by October 26. The outcome is assured.

In a Batumi courtroom this January, Mzia Amaghlobeli clutched Maria Ressa's memoirHow to Stand Up to a Dictator as the judge ordered her detained. The 50-year-old founder of Georgia's Batumelebi and Netgazeti news outlets had been arrested twice in one night—first for posting a strike placard on a police station wall, then again after slapping the Batumi police chief, who had spat in her face and threatened violence.
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Within hours, Amaghlobeli declared a hunger strike that would last 38 brutal days. The chairman of the Georgian Dream party dismissed her protest as "blackmailing the state," sneering that she should "just start eating." But Amaghlobeli refused, telling visitors: "If a sacrifice is needed, let it be me. Freedom is far more valuable than life."
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Her defiance embodies Georgia's year-long rebellion against billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili's authoritarian regime. After last October’s rigged parliamentary elections, hundreds of thousands filled Tbilisi's streets waving Georgian, American and EU flags—demanding the European future promised in their constitution. When Georgian Dream suspended EU talks in November, the uprising exploded. Police responded with water cannons and tear gas. At least 225 of 327 detained protesters bore visible injuries from beatings.
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Protests flared again last week. Thousands filled Tbilisi's streets, with some attempting to storm the presidential palace. Under Biden, the US sanctioned Ivanishvili for undermining Georgia's democratic future for Russia's benefit. Trump has kept the sanctions in place. Amaghlobeli was eventually convicted and sentenced to two years, becoming Georgia's first female political prisoner since Soviet collapse.
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Georgia's rebellion proves Moscow cannot extinguish a generation that remembers freedom—and refuses to forget it.

Every morning before dawn, Sanae Takaichi began her six-hour commute from Nara to Kobe University—imposed when her parents refused to fund prestigious Tokyo universities because they were reserved for sons, not daughters. But the young rebel wouldn't be contained. With pink hair blazing, she roared to campus on her motorcycle, then pounded drums in a heavy metal band so ferociously she carried four backup pairs of sticks. That defiant energy never dimmed.
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Now 64, Takaichi has smashed Japan's ultimate glass ceiling. On October 4, she won the Liberal Democratic Party leadership, putting her on track to become Japan's first female prime minister. Like her idol Margaret Thatcher—whom she met shortly before the Iron Lady's death in 2013—Takaichi preaches fiscal expansion, military strength, and unapologetic conservatism.
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But within a week, her premiership-in-waiting collapsed into turmoil. Komeito, the LDP's coalition partner for 26 years, quit the alliance—officially citing unease over corruption and governance, though her hardline nationalism and shrine visits deepened the rift. The split leaves Takaichi scrambling for a new majority ahead of next week’s confirmation vote, as opposition parties rally behind a rival candidate.
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What makes Takaichi vital for democracy isn't her conservative politics—it's her defiance of Japan's sclerotic elite. She won no inherited seat, no family fortune. Instead, she clawed upward: from congressional fellow in Washington to ten-time parliamentarian. A China hawk and Taiwan ally, she pledges constitutional reform allowing Japan real military power—essential as Beijing threatens the region.
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It remains to be seen whether she becomes another Iron Lady, but the rocker who once broke sticks has already ensured Japan's future won't be decided by men alone.

Bonus: International Story

The UN Human Rights Council continued its nosedive into irrelevance this week, electing China's Ren Yisheng and Iran's Afsaneh Nadipour to its advisory committee—the panel that interviews and selects independent human rights experts worldwide. The appointments are obscene. Ren spent his career defending China's genocide against Uyghurs. Nadipour the Iranian “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising as politically motivated, siding with the regime's crackdown.
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This isn't an aberration—it's the pattern. In February, Trump withdrew the US from the Council for the second time, declaring "They're going to end up losing their credibility like other organizations, and then they're going to be nothing."
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The Council has never passed a condemnatory resolution against China, Cuba, Russia, or Saudi Arabia despite their atrocious records. It has held only five special sessions on Iran, Libya and Myanmar combined. In 2015, Saudi Arabia—in which women still could not drive and which had beheaded more people that year than ISIS—was appointed to chair the panel.
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The vision Eleanor Roosevelt once championed deserves better. In 1948, Roosevelt chaired the UN Commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a foundational document establishing that all humans are "born free and equal in dignity and rights." Working through Cold War tensions and cultural divisions, she mustered consensus for a declaration that has inspired over 70 human rights treaties and influenced many national constitutions.
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Roosevelt's declaration remains humanity's north star. But the Council charged with defending it has become a shield for the world's worst abusers.

Freedom Fighter of the Week: María Corina Machado

Gunshots cracked the air as regime forces fired at the motorcycle carrying María Corina Machado through Caracas streets. Minutes earlier, the 58-year-old had stood atop a truck waving Venezuela's flag, declaring to thousands: "Venezuela is free. The regime is over." Security forces violently intercepted her convoy, knocked her from the motorcycle, and dragged her away. During detention, they forced her to record coerced videos before releasing her. One Venezuelan was shot during her arrest.
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It was the day before Maduro's fraudulent January inauguration. Machado had emerged from over 100 days in hiding to lead what might be her final stand.
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This week, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
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The industrial engineer founded Súmate over twenty years ago to defend free elections. She led a 2002 referendum to recall Hugo Chávez, earning treason charges and death threats that forced her children abroad. Yet she refused exile, remaining to build Venezuela's fractured opposition into a unified force. Her idol: Margaret Thatcher, whose unyielding resolve she's channeled throughout her fight.
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In 2023, Machado won the opposition primary with 93% of votes. Maduro's regime banned her from office, retroactively extending a spurious 12-month ban to fifteen years. Undeterred, she backed Edmundo González as her proxy. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers trained as election observers, documenting vote counts before the regime could destroy ballots. The tallies proved González won with 67 percent against Maduro's 30 percent.
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Maduro responded with brutal persecution—arresting Vente Venezuela members, shutting down restaurants that welcomed Machado, sending thugs to block her rallies. Nearly all her senior advisers have been detained or forced to flee. González escaped to Spain. But Machado stayed, living in hiding despite death threats—a choice that inspired millions.
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The Nobel Committee praised her for uniting the opposition, resisting militarization, and supporting peaceful democratic transition. Venezuela's freedom remains unfinished. But Machado's defiance proves dictatorships cannot crush those who refuse to stay silent.

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