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A Chinese court imposed a four-year jail sentence on a female journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak, for “provoking disputes and causing problems,” her lawyer said.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was among a handful of people whose first-hand accounts of crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the epicenter of the pandemic than the official narrative.
“I don’t understand. All he did was say a few true words, and that’s why he received four years,” said Shao Wenxia, Zhang’s mother, who attended the trial with her husband.
Zhang’s lawyer, Ren Quanniu, told Reuters they “will probably appeal” after the trial in a court in Pudong, a district of Shanghai’s commercial center.
“Ms. Zhang believes that she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of expression,” she had said before the trial.
Critics say China deliberately arranged for Zhang’s trial to take place during the Western Christmas season to minimize Western attention and scrutiny.
“Beijing’s selection of the sleep period between Christmas and New Year suggests that it is even ashamed to sentence citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for recounting the uncensored version of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak,” Kenneth Roth tweeted, the Genevan. executive director of Human Rights Watch.
Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been censored, with whistleblowers like doctors warning.
State media have attributed the country’s success in controlling the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
The virus has spread around the world, infecting more than 80 million people and killing more than 1.76 million, crippling air travel as nations erected barriers against it that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.
In Shanghai, the police imposed strict security measures outside the court where the trial began seven months after Zhang’s arrest.
Foreign journalists were denied entry to court “due to the epidemic,” court security officials said.
Zhang, a former lawyer, arrived in Wuhan on February 1 from her home in Shanghai.
His short video clips uploaded to YouTube consist of interviews with residents, commentary, and footage from a crematorium, train stations, hospitals, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Arrested in mid-May, she went on a hunger strike in late June, according to court documents seen by Reuters.
Her lawyers told the court that the police tied her hands and force-fed her with a tube.
In December, he was suffering from headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, low blood pressure, and a throat infection.
Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail before the trial and to broadcast the trial live were ignored, his lawyer said.
Other citizen journalists who had disappeared without explanation included Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.
While there has been no word from Fang, Li reappeared in a YouTube video in April to say that he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken publicly, a friend said.
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