HONG KONG – A Chinese court has sentenced a civilian journalist to four years in prison for documenting how Covid-19 destroyed the city where the coronavirus was first detected, in a case highlighting how long Beijing’s official story of the pandemic.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was found guilty of “picking and causing trouble” on Monday in a two-hour trial in the Pudong New Area People’s Court in Shanghai, where prosecutors accused her of spreading falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic. . posts and interviews with overseas media, her lawyers said.
The ruling comes more than seven months after authorities detained Ms Zhang in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic, where she posted more than 120 YouTube videos describing and setting out the conditions in the city, which according to her wrong steps were in the initial government. pandemic response.
Her detention is linked to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s campaign to portray the coronavirus pandemic in China as a showcase of the good government of the Communist Party, with extensive propaganda and censorship efforts aimed at public anger. to soften and suppress criticism against erroneous in the initial response of the government.
The case against Mrs. Zhang is the first known prosecution of a civilian journalist covering the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, where the government’s efforts to punish whistleblowers and suppress information about the early outbreak caused a public backlash and led ordinary citizens to it. has to check the conditions in Wuhan. with first-hand accounts on social media. At least three other civilian journalists in Wuhan disappeared in February, and although one of them briefly reappeared in April, their fate remains unclear, rights activists say.
A screaming snippet taken Monday from an undated video showing Zhang broadcasting it via YouTube.
Photo:
handout / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
The charge against me. Zhang, “to choose quarrels and provoke problems,” is vaguely defined and is often used to prosecute activists and dissidents. “Authorities are sending a warning to anyone who dares to put the government in a bad light,” said Gwen Lee, a campaigner in China at Amnesty International, a human rights watchdog.
According to Zhang Keke, during the trial on Monday, Zhang said she considered the proceedings against her illegal and refused to answer the prosecutor’s questions. She was brought to the courtroom in a wheelchair, probably due to her debilitating condition as a result of a hunger strike, said Mr. Zhang, who was present in the courtroom on Monday, said.
The lawyer, who is not related to the accused, said the severity of Zhang’s punishment may be due in part to her laws in the past. Shanghai police issued a warning to her in 2018 for alleged provocative online activities, before detaining her twice next year for offenses related to quarrels and public disorder, according to a indictment issued by The Wall Street Journal has been reviewed.
The court found Mrs. Zhang did not ask if she intended to appeal, nor did she express any preference before she was escorted, Mr. Zhang said. Zhang said. Zhang could not be reached for comment. Calls to press officers at the Pudong court and prosecutor’s office read unanswered.
A former lawyer and a resident of Shanghai, Ms. Zhang, traveled to Wuhan in early February after authorities sealed the city in late January to contain the coronavirus. In a video shared by rights activists after her arrest, 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 daily life under mass quarantine in Wuhan, visited medical facilities, walked through mostly deserted city streets and talked to locals. Sometimes she made her own comments about the conditions in the city, ranging from economic impact and government propaganda.
“The party flags and red symbols at many entrances in the area all indicate that epidemic prevention is not important,” she writes. a May 7 tweet with photos of what appeared to be checkpoints at entrances to Wuhan residential connections. “Protecting regime stability affected by the pandemic is the real goal.”
A potentially deadly virus spread rapidly from its epicenter in the city of Wuhan, killing hundreds around China and reaching the United States, Japan and South Korea. Countries are chasing the outbreak, and Wuhan residents are taking their own protective measures. Photo: Agence France-Presse / Getty Images (Originally published on January 22, 2020)
Prosecutors told me. Zhang is accused of using social media platforms, including the Chinese messaging program WeChat, Twitter and YouTube, to spread ‘large amounts of false information’, according to the complaint reviewed by the Journal. Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China. They also claim that Ms. Zhang “maliciously” spurred the malicious situation in the negotiations with US government-funded Radio Free Asia and the Epoch Media Group, which had links to the Falun Gong spiritual movement founded in China and clashed with each other. the Communist Party.
Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said prosecutors had apparently rushed through their presentation of the case, and did not want to offer specific examples of posts on social media that allegedly contained falsehoods.
Me. Zhang’s messages on social media attracted relatively little attention. Most of her YouTube videos received hundreds of views each end of December, though some did receive thousands of views. Her last video, which was posted just before her arrest on May 14, was the most popular, with about 30,000 times since the end of December, although Ms. Zhang’s lawyer said many of her videos only got viewers after her arrest.
“Ordinary Chinese people can’t see them. What impact could they have had? What exactly is the government afraid of? Says Mr. Zhang, the lawyer. “The government may not be able to tolerate the way it criticizes.”
Write to Chun Han Wong by [email protected]
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