A Chinese court yesterday handed a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from Wuhan at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said.
Zhang Zhan (張展), 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the epicenter of the pandemic than the official narrative.
“We will probably appeal,” said the lawyer, Ren Quanniu (任全牛), adding that the trial at a court in Shanghai’s Pudong district ended at 12:30pm with Zhang being sentenced to four years in prison.
“Ms Zhang believes she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech,” Ren had said before the trial.
Criticism of China’s early handling of the COVID-19 outbreak has been censored and whistle-blowers, such as doctors, warned. State media have credited success in reining in the pandemic to the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
The coronavirus has spread worldwide to infect more than 80.7 million people and kill more than 1.76 million, paralyzing air travel as nations threw up barriers against it that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.
Police in Shanghai enforced tight security outside the court where the trial opened seven months after Zhang’s detention, although some supporters were undeterred.
A man in a wheelchair, who said that he came from Henan Province to demonstrate support for Zhang as a fellow Christian, wrote her name on a poster before police arrived to escort him away.
Foreign journalists were denied entry to the court “due to the pandemic,” court security officials said.
A former lawyer, Zhang traveled to Wuhan on Feb. 1 from her home in Shanghai.
Her short videos uploaded to YouTube consisted of interviews with residents, commentary and footage of a crematorium, railway stations, hospitals and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Detained in mid-May, she went on a hunger strike in late June, court documents said.
Her lawyers told the court that police strapped her hands and force-fed her with a tube. By this month, she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach ache, low blood pressure and a throat infection.
Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail and to livestream the trial were ignored, her lawyer said.
Other citizen-journalists who disappeared without explanation include Fang Bin (方斌), Chen Qiushi (陳秋實) and Li Zehua (李澤華).
While there has been no news of Fang, Li re-emerged in a YouTube video in April to say he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken publicly, a friend said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS