China Jails Citizen Journalist for her accounts of Covid-19 in Wuhan

The verdict came more than seven months after authorities told Ms. Zhang had detained in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the pandemic’s original epicenter, where she posted more than 120 YouTube videos about conditions in the city, detailing what she saw as missteps in the initial pandemic response.

Her detention ties in with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s campaign to rearrange the coronavirus pandemic in China as a showcase of the Communist Party’s good governance, with extensive propaganda and censorship efforts to mitigate public anger and criticism of missteps in to suppress the government’s initial response.

The case against Ms. Zhang is the first known prosecution of a citizen reporter who reported on the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, where the government’s efforts to punish whistleblowers and suppress information about the early outbreak sparked a public backlash and some commonplace urge citizens to document the conditions in Wuhan. with first-hand accounts through social media. At least three other citizen journalists in Wuhan disappeared in February and although one of them resurfaced briefly in April, their fate remains unclear, rights activists say.

The charge against Ms. Zhang, “To argue and provoke trouble”, is vaguely defined and has often been used to prosecute activists and dissidents. “Authorities are sending a warning to anyone who dares to portray the government in a bad light,” said Gwen Lee, a Chinese campaigner with Amnesty International, a human rights watchdog.

At Monday’s trial, Ms. Zhang said she considered the proceedings against her illegal and declined to answer the prosecution’s questions, one of her lawyers, Zhang Keke, said. She was taken to court in a wheelchair, likely because of her weakened condition as a result of a hunger strike, said Mr. Zhang, who was in court on Monday.

The attorney, who is not related to the defendant, said the severity of Ms. Zhang’s sentence may be due in part to her previous clashes with the law. Shanghai police warned her of allegedly inflammatory online activity in 2018, before detaining her twice the following year for crimes related to picking up feuds and causing public disorder, according to a charge form reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The court did not ask Ms Zhang whether she intended to appeal, nor did she express a preference before escorting her out, Mr Zhang said. Ms. Zhang could not be reached for comment. Calls to press officials at Pudong Court and the Procuratorate went unanswered.

Zhang, a former lawyer and resident of Shanghai, traveled to Wuhan in early February after authorities shut down the city in late January to contain the coronavirus. In a video shared by rights activists after her detention, she said she decided to go there after seeing an online essay describing Wuhan as an ‘abandoned city’.

In a series of YouTube videos and tweets, Ms. Zhang documented scenes of everyday life under mass quarantine in Wuhan, visiting medical facilities, walking through largely deserted streets, and talking to local residents. At times, she provided her own commentary on the conditions in the city, ranging from economic impact to government propaganda.

“The party flags and red symbols at many entrances to the neighborhood all indicate that epidemic prevention is not important,” she wrote. a tweet from May 7 with photos of what appeared to be checkpoints at residential entrances in Wuhan. “Protecting the stability of the regime affected by the pandemic is the real goal.”

Prosecutors accused Ms. Zhang of using social media platforms, including China’s messaging app WeChat, Twitter, and YouTube, to “spread large amounts of false information,” according to the indictment form reviewed by the Journal. Twitter and YouTube have been blocked in China. They also claimed that Mrs. Zhang “maliciously resolved” the pandemic situation in interviews with US government-funded Radio Free Asia and the Epoch Media Group, which has ties to and collided with the Falun Gong spiritual movement that was founded in China. the Communist Party.

Mr. Zhang, the attorney, said prosecutors appeared to be rushing their presentation of the case and refused to provide specific examples of social media posts allegedly containing falsehoods.

Ms. Zhang’s social media posts seemed to have attracted relatively little attention. Most of her YouTube videos were viewed hundreds of times in late December, although some were viewed thousands of times. Her latest video, posted just before her detention on May 14, was the most popular, with about 30,000 views in late December, although Ms. Zhang’s attorney said many of her videos didn’t get more viewers until after her detention.

“Ordinary Chinese cannot see them. What impact could they have had? What exactly is the government afraid of? said Mr. Zhang, the lawyer. “The government may not tolerate the way it criticizes it.”

Write to Chun Han Wong at [email protected]