According to her lawyers, Zhang started a long hunger strike in protest of her arrest and charge. In response, authorities forcibly fed her through a feeding tube and held her hands so she could not pull them out.
Me. Zhang’s trial, held at the Shanghai Pudong People’s Court on Monday, lasted less than three hours. The official charge she was found guilty of was “to detect quarrels and provoke problems”, a vague, general charge against critics of the government. Prosecutors initially recommended a sentence of between four and five years.
Me. Zhang appeared in a wheelchair for the trial, one of her lawyers, Zhang Ke Ke, wrote on WeChat, a messaging app, on Monday. Mr. Zhang had written in a report a few days earlier that she had lost a significant amount of weight and that she had been almost unrecognizable almost a few weeks before.
Me. Zhang barely spoke during the trial, except to say that people’s speech should not be censored, writes Mr. Zhang, who is not related to me. Zhang does not.
After the sentence was announced, Ms. Zhang’s mother, who was escorted to the courthouse by security officers, sobbed uncontrollably, said Ren Quanniu, another of Zhang’s lawyers.
Few other people were allowed, as sensitive hearings in China are often held behind closed doors. Prior to the trial, reporters and supporters of Ms. Zhang gathered near the courthouse but was pushed away by security officers. One of me. Zhang’s friends, Li Dawei, said he and about ten other people who wanted to attend the trial were taken to a nearby police station.
Chen Jiangang, a Chinese human rights lawyer, said the length of Zhang’s sentence showed that the government considered the preservation of his account of the outbreak to be fundamental to his grip on power.