Today a Chinese court has sentenced a journalist to prison for four years for reporting on the coronavirus outbreak, which was meant to be a warning for those who choose to challenge the government’s official narrative of the pandemic.
37-year-old Zhang Zhan is the first known person to face trial for documenting China’s outbreak. In February, Ms. Zhang, who is a former lawyer, traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai during the peak of China’s outbreak, to see the toll from the virus in the city where it first emerged. Over the course of several months, she shared videos that showed overcrowded hospitals and residents who were worried about their incomes.
The news media in China is closely regulated by the state. Some citizen journalists aim to provide more investigative reporting on the internet and social media sites where they publish. Yet their role is always censored, and they are disciplined regularly.
In her dispatches, Ms. Zhang was highly critical of the government, asking why it had sought to silence whistle-blowers about the virus and questioned whether Wuhan’s lockdown was too harshly enforced.
She also explicitly challenged propaganda that exalted the response of the government. The Chinese government has been locked in a persistent campaign almost from the very beginning of the outbreak to quash criticisms that it originally attempted to hide the virus. Other citizen journalists have been jailed; they’ve threatened grieving family members and censored social media.
In lieu of those criticisms, in coping with the public health emergency, the government cast itself as responsible, benevolent, and open, an image that infuriated Ms. Zhang.
“The government’s way of managing this city has just been intimidation and threats,” she said in one of her videos. “This is truly the tragedy of this country.”
That turned out to be her last video. In May, Ms. Zhang abruptly stopped responding to messages. Her friends later learned that she had been arrested and brought back to Shanghai, accused of spreading lies and making up false information.
In protest of her arrest and indictment, Ms. Zhang had begun a prolonged hunger strike, her lawyers said. In response, the authorities force-fed her through a feeding tube and restrained her hands so she could not pull it out.
At the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court, Ms. Zhang’s trial lasted less than three hours. She was officially charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge commonly used against critics of the government. Initially, prosecutors recommended a sentence between four and five years.
Ms. Zhang’s lawyer, Zhang Ke Ke, wrote in WeChat messaging app that she had appeared for the trial in a wheelchair. Mr. Zhang had written in a post a few days earlier that she had lost a significant amount of weight and was almost unrecognizable from even just a few weeks before.
Mr. Zhang (who is not related to Ms. Zhang) wrote that Ms. Zhang barely spoke during the hearing, except to say that people’s speech should not be censored,
Ms. Zhang’s mother, who had been escorted to the courthouse for trial by security officers, sobbed uncontrollably after the sentence was confirmed, Ren Quanniu, another of Ms. Zhang’s lawyers, said.
Few others were permitted in, as important hearings are mostly conducted behind closed doors in China. Reporters and supporters of Ms. Zhang gathered outside the courthouse in anticipation of the hearing, but security officials moved them away. One of Ms. Zhang’s relatives, Li Dawei, said that he was taken to a nearby police station, along with about 10 other people who had tried to attend the hearing.
The length of Ms. Zhang’s sentence indicated that the government saw maintaining its narrative of the outbreak as fundamental to its grip on power, Chen Jiangang, a Chinese human rights lawyer, said.
“Any time the Chinese Communist Party thinks of a case as political, what they use is suppression. Extremely cruel suppression,” said Mr. Chen, who fled to the United States last year.
“What was Zhang Zhan’s crime?” he continued. “She just went to Wuhan, saw some things, talked about them. That’s it.”
After providing on-the-ground details that at times contrasted with the official narrative, Ms. Zhang was one of at least four citizen journalists to disappear suddenly from Wuhan. Two others were reportedly released later, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua, while another, Fang Bin, is still missing.
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