Guilty of the crime of “fomenting disputes and causing problems”. For this “crime” 37-year-old Chinese activist Zhang Zhan, blogger and dissident, was sentenced. that with his videos on social media he told, from her point of view, that of a citizen opposed to the regime, the days of the lockdown and the protests of the citizens of Wuhan, challenging the propaganda about the epidemic who wanted to describe the Party as the leader of a united people in a great battle against the virus.
But Beijing cannot allow information to have a free field to tell the truth. And those who do are punished harshly, so it was for many, so it is for Zhang Zhan: whose sentence imposed by the Shanghai court, in practice for having accused the government, is four years in prison, close to the maximum foreseen.
Chinese citizen journalist faces trial for Wuhan virus reporting.
Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, could face up to five years in jail if convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for her reportinghttps://t.co/WIBQdjlwMb
📸 @hectorretamal pic.twitter.com/5A9VnCDz9K
– AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 28, 2020
Zhan, a former lawyer, had gone to Wuhan in early February, without being linked to any newspaper, to disseminate direct testimonials through his social profiles on WeChat, Twitter e YouTube. His accounts recounted a crisis management at the epicenter of the pandemic very different and above all worse than the official Chinese government narrative, which during the worst months of the crisis has censored and manipulated most of the testimonies to reduce the perception of the danger of the virus.
AFP’s @LeoRamirezAFP photographs police trying to stop journalists from recording outside the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court, where the trial is set to begin of Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan – who was detained in May for reporting on Wuhan’s Covid-19 outbreak pic.twitter.com/COZ85owKCS
– AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 28, 2020
Zhan had filmed and photographed the long lines in hospitals, the sacks full of lifeless bodies, the threats aimed at relatives who claimed the ashes of their loved ones, citizens’ complaints about the harshness of the quarantine or economic uncertainty. In short, everything that the propaganda hid, showing, instead, an efficient response from the authorities.
But for anyone to criticize the government is unacceptable in Beijing. After having arrested, or sometimes disappeared, four bloggers, (two of them, Chen Qiushi e Li Zehua, were released after months of domestic detention, by a third, Fang Bin, there is still no news), the repression, in the end, also came against Zhang, the first to end up on trial and be sentenced.
As the BBC reports, Zhan has been on hunger strike in prison for several months and she arrived at the Pudong court on a stretcher. His lawyers say he is not in good health at the moment. “Zhang Zhan looked devastated when the sentence was announced,” Ren Quanniu, one of her defense lawyers, told AFP news agency.
The entire hearing lasted three hours, during which time according to his lawyers the evidence was not even discussed, only enumerated. Friends and supporters who came to attend were not allowed into the courtroom. Zhang would have said only one thing: “People’s words cannot be censored.”
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