HONG KONG – A Chinese court imposed a four-year prison sentence on a citizen journalist who documented how Covid-19 devastated the city where the coronavirus was first detected, in a case that highlights how far Beijing has defended its official narrative. of the pandemic.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was convicted of “provoking fights and causing problems” after a two-and-a-half-hour trial at the Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Court on Monday, where prosecutors accused her of spreading lies about the coronavirus pandemic through social media posts and interviews with foreign media, his lawyers said.
The verdict came more than seven months after authorities detained Zhang in the city of Wuhan, in central China, the original epicenter of the pandemic, where she posted more than 120 videos on YouTube reporting the city’s conditions and detailed what she saw as missteps in the government’s initials response to the pandemic.
His detention fits into the campaign by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to reshape the coronavirus pandemic in China as a showcase for good Communist Party governance, featuring extensive propaganda and censorship efforts aimed at calming public anger and suppressing criticism against missteps in the initial government response.
The case against Ms. Zhang is the first known case of a citizen journalist who covered the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, where government efforts to punish whistleblowers and suppress information about the initial outbreak sparked a public reaction and led some ordinary citizens to register conditions in Wuhan with first-hand accounts on social media. At least three other citizen journalists in Wuhan disappeared in February, and although one briefly reappeared in April, his fate is not yet clear, human rights activists say.
Screenshot taken on Monday from an undated video showing Ms. Zhang while she was streaming on YouTube.
Photograph:
brochure / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
The charge against Ms. Zhang, “provoking fights and causing problems”, is vaguely defined and often used to prosecute activists and dissidents. “The authorities are sending an alert to anyone who dares to put the government in a negative position,” said Gwen Lee, a Chinese activist at Amnesty International, a human rights organization.
During Monday’s trial, Zhang said he considered the proceedings against her illegitimate and refused to answer questions from the prosecution, according to one of his lawyers, Zhang Keke. She was taken to court in a wheelchair, probably due to her weakened condition due to a hunger strike, said Zhang, who was present at the court on Monday.
The lawyer, who is not related to the defendant, said the severity of Zhang’s punishment may be due in part to his previous disagreements with the law. Shanghai police warned her in 2018 for alleged seditious online activity, before arresting her twice on the following year for crimes related to fighting and public disorder, according to an accusation sheet reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The court did not ask Zhang if she intended to appeal, nor did she express a preference before being escorted out, Zhang said. Ms. Zhang could not be reached for comment. Calls to press officers from the Pudong court and prosecutor’s office were not answered.
A former Shanghai lawyer and resident, Zhang traveled to Wuhan in early February, after authorities isolated the city in late January to contain the coronavirus. In a video shared by human rights activists after her arrest, she said she decided to go there after seeing an online essay that described Wuhan as an “abandoned city”.
In a series of YouTube videos and tweets, Ms. Zhang documented scenes of daily life under mass quarantine in Wuhan, visiting medical facilities, walking through most of the city’s deserted streets and speaking to local residents. Sometimes she commented on the city’s conditions, from the economic impact to government propaganda.
“Party flags and red symbols on many entrances to the neighborhood indicate that preventing the epidemic is not important,” she wrote in a May 7 tweet with photos of what appeared to be control points at the entrances to Wuhan’s residential complexes. “Protecting the stability of the regime that was affected by the pandemic is the real objective.”
Spreading rapidly from its epicenter in the city of Wuhan, a potentially lethal virus has sickened hundreds of people across China and has hit the United States, Japan and South Korea. Countries are rushing to contain the outbreak and residents of Wuhan are taking their own protective measures. Photo: Agence France-Presse / Getty Images (Originally published on January 22, 2020)
Prosecutors accused Zhang of using social media platforms, including the Chinese messaging app WeChat, Twitter and YouTube to “spread large volumes of false information,” according to the accusation sheet reviewed by the Journal. Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China. They also claimed that Ms. Zhang “maliciously exaggerated” the pandemic situation in interviews with the US government-funded Radio Free Asia and the Epoch Media Group, which has links to the Falun Gong spiritual movement that was founded in China. and the communist party came into conflict.
Zhang, the lawyer, said prosecutors appeared to be in a hurry to present the case, refusing to provide specific examples of social media posts that allegedly contained falsehoods.
Zhang’s social media posts appear to have attracted relatively little attention. Most of his videos on YouTube gained hundreds of views in late December, although some have accumulated thousands of views. His latest video, posted shortly before his arrest on May 14, was the most popular, with around 30,000 views in late December, although Zhang’s lawyer said many of his videos gained an audience only after his arrest.
“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 be able to tolerate the way it criticizes.”
Write to Chun Han Wong at [email protected]
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