On December 28, a court in Shanghai, China, sentenced Zhang Zhan, a Chinese journalist who had documented the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, the city where in December last year, had been registered in Wuhan to 4 years in prison. first infections. The accusation against him is that it “caused quarrels and problems”, a very vague wording often used by the Chinese government to incriminate activists and dissidents.
Zhan, a former lawyer, is 37 years old and had gone to Wuhan in early February independently, without being linked to any newspaper, to spread direct testimonies through her social profiles on WeChat. Twitter e YouTube. His accounts recounted a much worse management of the crisis in the epicenter of the pandemic than the official narrative of the Chinese government, which in general during the worst months of the crisis censored testimonies and manipulated public discourse to reduce the perception of the danger of the virus.
While state media attributed the success in containing the coronavirus to President Xi Jinping’s leadership, Zhang Zhan documented a crowded hospital with corridors filled with beds and entered crematoria to try to quantify the victims. Zhan’s videos, sometimes short and confusing, testified to the difficulties of gathering the opinions of people in China, who often refused to speak to her or asked not to be framed in the face.
On WeChat, a very popular social network in China, Zhan was often censored, which is why she used Twitter or YouTube more often, which in China are blocked and accessible only through virtual private networks (VPNs). Zhan had managed to gather the complaints of the families of the victims who asked the government for greater responsibility and had also denounced the disappearance of other independent journalists who in Wuhan did a similar job to hers: Li Zehua, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin. There has been news of the first two (one is forced into quarantine, the other is at home under the supervision of the government), of the third still nothing is known.
However, the repression also came to an end against Zhan, who disappeared on May 14 secondo Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a non-governmental organization for the defense of human rights in China. The next day it appears she was already detained in Shanghai (640 kilometers from Wuhan), but the official charges were raised only a few months later. to november.
In September, one of her lawyers was allowed to visit her for the first time. Lawyers said they found her in worrying health conditions and that in June, to protest her arrest, Zhan had started a hunger strike. In December, attorney Zhang Keke discovered that she had been intubated to be fed. Throughout this period, Zhan has rejected allegations of spreading and fabricating false information about the pandemic. Zhan was arrested as early as September 2019, on suspicion of causing unrest with her support for ongoing protests in Hong Kong, and was later released in November.
After the sentencing, one of Zhan’s lawyers, Ren Quanniu, he told Reuters who will likely appeal the sentence, adding that Zhan claims “she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech.” Outside the court where the trial took place there was some protest and journalists who tried to document the event were turned away by the police.
Heavy security as Chinese citizen journalist jailed for 4 years for reporting on Wuhan virus.
Zhang Zhan’s live reports were widely shared on social media in Februaryhttps://t.co/wnuAD2P6wc
???? Police try to block journalists outside the Shanghai court where Zhang was on trial pic.twitter.com/Wmd7aDMA8E
– AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 28, 2020
– Read also: How China has censored the pandemic
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