2024-05-14 05:46:56
A Chinese journalist who was behind bars for four years for her reporting on the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan will be released after serving her sentence.
Zhang Zhang is one of the few independent Chinese journalists covering the events in Wuhan after the total lockdown of the city of 11 million people. It offers a rare, unfiltered look at reality on the ground as Chinese authorities impose strict censorship on media coverage, CNN writes.
She was detained in May 2020 and a few months later was sentenced to four years in prison for “causing controversy and trouble,” a charge the Chinese government often uses to persecute dissidents and human rights activists.
Ahead of her expected release on Monday, supporters and human rights groups called on the Chinese government to release Zhang on schedule.
Reporters Without Borders, which in 2021 awarded Zhang its press freedom prize, called on “the international community to put pressure on the authorities to secure her unconditional release on Monday.”
In early February 2020, just days after Wuhan was locked down, Zhang traveled from Shanghai to the central Chinese city to report on the spread of the virus and subsequent efforts to contain it, just as authorities tightened censorship on state-owned and private Chinese media.
For more than three months, she documented snippets of life in the shuttered city of Wuhan and the harsh reality its residents face, from overcrowded hospitals to empty shops, as the world prepares for the virus to spread. She posts her observations, photos and videos on Wechat, Twitter and YouTube – the latter two of which are blocked in China.
“I can’t find anything to say because everything is covered. This is the problem facing this country right now: any dissenting opinion can be (dismissed) as “hearsay”. Even our own voices are out of our control. They are imprisoning us in the name of pandemic prevention and limiting our freedom. If we can’t get the truth, if we can’t break their monopoly on the truth, the world will be meaningless to us,” she said in a video two weeks after arriving in Wuhan, wearing a face mask.
In mid-May, her publications stopped abruptly, and later it became clear that she was detained by the police and returned to Shanghai.
Since being detained, the 40-year-old woman has gone on hunger strike several times, and her health is causing concern among supporters and human rights groups. In 2021, Zhang’s mother stated that her daughter was so weak that she could not hold her head up due to lack of strength and was in desperate need of medical care.
During a previous hunger strike, Amnesty International alleged that Jan was shackled and force-fed, which the group said amounted to torture.
In a lengthy statement released in July 2020, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that the Chinese government cracked down on journalists who “exercised their right to free speech on the Internet” during the pandemic, bTV reported.
“In China, no one is punished or penalized just for making remarks. All along, the Chinese government has conducted its response to COVID-19 in an open and transparent manner and has made widely recognized achievements,” the statement said.
Zhang is one of a number of independent reporters who have been detained or disappeared at the start of the pandemic, as Chinese authorities clamp down on coverage of the virus and propaganda outlets race to portray Beijing’s response as effective and timely.
China has the most jailed journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders, which ranks it 172nd out of 180 countries in its annual press freedom index.
Authorities tightly control the press, while blocking most foreign media through the Great Firewall, the vast apparatus of online censorship and surveillance.