Citizen Journalist Who Reported on Wuhan COVID Outbreak Sentenced to Four Years in Prison

(The AEGIS Alliance) – Zhang Zhan, a journalist, has been penalized with a four-year prison sentence. The independent journalist was reporting early on the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. The thirty-seven-year-old was in Wuhan for three months. During this time, she used platforms like Youtube, Twitter, and WeChat to report about COVID.

“The party flags and red symbols at many neighborhood entrances all indicate that epidemic prevention isn’t important,” her May 7 tweet reads. “Protecting regime stability that has been impacted by the pandemic is the actual goal.”

Zhang Zhan was arrested in May. The journalist was arrested for spreading false information, doing interviews for foreign media companies, and causing a disruption to public order. Her attorney has said that there is no evidence to prove what she is being accused of. Zhang fought back by going on a hunger strike. She did this hunger strike while in jail.

“She is … being shackled and her hands have been bound 24 hours a day for more than three months, and there is grave fear for her health and well-being and risk of further torture and other ill-treatment,” Amnesty International said in a statement on December 10.

On Monday, The United Nations human rights office said it’s “deeply concerned” by Zhang’s sentence, and said, “We raised her case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive clampdown on freedom of expression linked to #COVID19 & continue to call for her release.”

The officials in the jail involuntarily forced her to eat. On Monday, she went to court in a wheelchair. China has received a lot of criticism from others. This is mainly because critics feel as though China failed to contain the spread of the virus.

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.