China Puts Journalist in Jail for Trying to Warn Other Countries About Covid-19

A Chinese court sentenced a journalist to 4 years in prison for trying to warn people about the Covid-19 outbreak from its epicenter in Wuhan last year.

37-year-old Zhang Zhan was one of several Chinese citizen-journalists to give firsthand accounts of the outbreak. She described crowded hospitals and empty streets, showing the world that the situation in Wuhan was much worse than what the communist government was suggesting.

Zhang arrived in Wuhan in early February to report on the deadly new virus. She posted her findings online, some of which were critical of the Chinese government, Reuters reported. Her Youtube videos “consist[ed] of interviews with residents, commentary and footage of a crematorium, train stations, hospitals and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Back in May, Zhang was arrested for allegedly spreading false information, granting interviews to foreign media, disrupting social order, and criticizing the government, according to NBC News.

According to her lawyers, police “strapped her hands and force-fed her with a tube” and that by December “she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach ache, low blood pressure and a throat infection.”

On Monday, the Pudong New Area People’s Court in Shanghai sentenced her to four years in jail for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” according to one of her lawyers. “We will probably appeal,” they added.

“I don’t understand. All she did was say a few true words, and for that she got four years,” Zhang’s mother, who was present at the trial with her husband, said.

Humanitarian critics have voiced concerns over China’s treatment and punishment of Zhang.

“We are deeply concerned by the 4-year prison sentence imposed on citizen journalist Zhang Zhan,” the UN Human Rights office tweeted. “We raised her case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive clampdown on freedom of expression linked to [COVID-19] & continue to call for her release.”

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticized the timing of the sentence. He suggested that Chinese authorities waited until the holiday season to avoid attention and scrutiny from the West.

“Beijing’s selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year’s suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan,” he said.

Chinese authorities have been trying to hide the dangers of the virus since the early days of the outbreak, censuring and detaining a number of doctors and journalists in Wuhan.

A study released in March found that if interventions in China has been “conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively — significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”