Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s search for the truth during the early days of the pandemic was seen as a threat by the authorities

A Chinese citizen journalist who has been in prison for four years after reporting on the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan is due to be released on Monday.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to document the Chinese government’s response to what became the start of a global pandemic. She shared her reports on X (then known as Twitter), YouTube and WeChat. She was one of the few independent Chinese reporters on the ground as Wuhan and the rest of China went into lockdown.

In one video, recorded in February 2020, Zhang said: “I can’t find anything to say except that the city is paralysed because everything is under cover. That’s what this country is facing now … They imprison us in the name of pandemic prevention and restrict our freedom. We must not talk to strangers, it’s dangerous. So without the truth, everything is meaningless. If we cannot get to the truth, if we cannot break the monopoly of the truth, the world means nothing to us.”

In another video, she showed a hospital that was overflowing with patients on trolleys in the hallway.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Braver than most western journalists, who regurgitate the corporatocracies narrative and manufacture consent on their behalf.

      Hopefully she’s given a good job and granted asylum somewhere in the west ASAP, so she can go on with her life.

      EDIT: Gotcha! What kind of smooth brain do you have to be to consider my above statements logically inconsistent, ironic, or hypocritical?

      None of the wests failings prevent it from currently enabling a freer and objectively better quality of life for the vast majority. She does not face persecution in the west. In China she has, and will continue to; especially under the social credit system.

      • mako@lemmy.today
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        6 months ago

        Braver than most western journalists, who regurgitate the corporatocracies narrative and manufacture consent on their behalf.

        True

        Hopefully she’s given a good job and granted asylum somewhere in the west ASAP, so she can go on with her life.

        What?

  • boyi@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 months ago

    And don’t forget the tragic ending suffered by the Dr (can’t remember his name) that first brought out the covid issue, and his phone messages were leaked to the public if I am not mistaken. He was left dead with no proper care by the authority.

    • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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      6 months ago

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

      I don’t think he isn’t properly treated, at least according to wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Illness_and_death

      There is a bench in New York central park dedicated to him: https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/02/07/central-park-bench-and-gathering-honor-covid-19-whistleblower . If you are near the central park, you can stop by to pay tribute to him.

      • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        By early June 2020, five other doctors had died from COVID-19 in the Wuhan hospital, now called “whistleblower hospital”.

        Was there a huge amount of doctors sick or did these guys just get disappeared?

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          6 months ago

          COVID was killing a lot of medical personnel initially because they weren’t using the right PPE and got infected with a large initial viral load.

          • theareciboincident@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            How quickly people forget how major metro hospitals in the US had rows of refrigerated semi trailers because there were too many bodies

            How doctors and nurses were told to wash and reuse their N95s despite it being proven to compromise their effectiveness because supplies were so low

            I hope this bird flu shit blows up even worse, maybe then these dumbasses will get the message

            • jonne@infosec.pub
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              6 months ago

              They’ll never learn. They told us to bang pots and pans for them, and now a few years later they’re still underpaid and overworked the world over. Same goes for every other ‘essential worker’.

            • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Oh I never washed mine. Just kept it in a plastic bag and wore it till the straps broke.

              Edit: downvotes make me laugh. For context, I was a pre vaccine nurse on a COVID unit for the duration of the pandemic. Never did catch it though from the hospital.

              Also wore a plastic face shield that I washed every time I left the room with bleach. Thankfully COVID is droplet spread so that’s plenty ppe. I wouldn’t have wanted to wear that N95 in a TB room though.

          • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            But the majority of deaths were always old people.

            Younger people got damaged lungs but dying was a rarity.

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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        6 months ago

        Wikipedia isn’t really a good source for anything ever. If you’re going to cite wikipedia then just grab the wikipedia’s source from the bottom of the page.

  • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Many posters on Lemmy make clear to me china doesn’t have these types of issues. What gives?

    Glad she’s out, hope she is able to leave the country, if she wishes.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      That shouldn’t be made clear to you because it’s false, China has piles of issues of every kind from homelessness to internment camps to wealthy elite.

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Even worker and labor protection issues. That’s the entire reason in fact that US companies like to go with Chinese labor. It costs far less because the workers don’t get paid as much and don’t have the labor protections that Western countries do.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          6 months ago

          Not as true as it was a couple of decades ago, they’ve been shifting to Taiwan lately, but yeah.

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        I’m being facetious, the overnight ml-lemmygrad-hexbear types chirp that message

    • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      It seems she was detained for spreading misinformation about the pandemic when the initial outbreak was at its peak. That may not be illegal in the US. However, plenty of countries have such laws that go into effect during emergency situations.

      I think it’s worth discussing the merits of those laws and how effective they are. However, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to use this case as a way to imply that China is silencing journalists when they report on inconvenient truths.

        • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          I just clicked through to a guardian link that talked about why she was initially convicted. It’s harder to pin down exactly what misinformation she was accused of spreading though since most western outlets are causally dismissive of the claims.

          https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/16/citizen-journalist-facing-jail-in-china-for-wuhan-covid-reporting-zhang-zhan

          That said, this guardian article references interviews she did with VoA, an American government outlet, and The Epoch Times, a far right wing outlet run by the Falun Gong cult. The Epoch Times I know in particular has promoted antivax or anti lockdown conspiracies in the US, as well as other stuff like with Qanon and the idea that Trump actually won in 2020. It wouldn’t surprise me to know she was promoting similar anti lockdown conspiracies but just in China.

      • ammonium@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        The mistake you make is that you assume the law works the same in China as in countries that have rule of law. China doesn’t have rule of law, they have ‘rule by law’. The Communist Party isn’t just above the law, the law is a tool for them to use how they see fit. If you are undermining the Communist Party then that is by definition misinformation.

        Remember, this is the same country where one day the minister of health aplauded a journalist’s effort to combat pollution with a documentary called under the dome, and the next day it was gone from the internet as if it never existed. Whenever they have internal issues they stir up some hatred for the USA or Japan, only to be forgotten somewhat later.

        They took 1984 not as a warning, but as a manual

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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        6 months ago

        You know who else was arrested for “spreading misinformation”? The doctor who tried to warn his friends about covid privately, before the government took any action.

        Source (in chinese): https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-51371586

        The form he filled out at police station, clearly stating his action is against the law:

        couple related articles in english:

        • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          He was never actually arrested though as far as I can tell. The local police basically gave him a warning against spreading rumors of an SARS outbreak because they were worried it would cause a panic. This was an overstep and the police later apologized and admitted they were in the wrong.

          • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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            6 months ago

            According to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/arrest, “arrest” means

            If the police arrest someone, they take them away to ask them about a crime that they might have committed

            And in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arrest

            to take or keep in custody by authority of law

            Dr. Li was taken to police station because the police has deemed his action is against the law.

            He was later released because he signed a consent about “stop spreading misinformation”, which I showed in my response. We wouldn’t know how he will be treated if he refuse to sign such consent. But I might hypothesize that the police wouldn’t simply let him go.

            And he has never spread any misinformation, the patient record he sent to his friend clearly indicated the patient has tested positive for SARS; and as we know later, the disease is indeed caused by SARS-cov2.

      • mako@lemmy.today
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        6 months ago

        @lemmy.ml

        Not everyone of course but there’s way too many people over there who will justify anything the Chinese government does or just ignore criticism by saying, “what about what the US does?!!?!”

        How they cannot understand that the US and China are both dystopian hellscapes is embarrassing.

  • blackberry@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    As a Chinese person, I want to say: She may be innocent, but she deserves it.

    Let’s think of China as a computer with numerous programs running on it. The programs represent people and activities (normal work and life). The governing bodies are the operating system, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the programmer sitting in front of the computer. Sometimes, when programs want to change something beyond their scope of action (like street protests or large-scale online denunciations—complaining in a personal capacity is considered within normal scope), the operating system often first acts to prevent these overreaching actions (many times this doesn’t involve persecution, but rather a phone call or a visit to tell you to stop. In common terms within the country, this is called “cooling down the heat”). The primary goal of the operating system is to maintain the stable operation of the computer. The more stable and efficient it runs, the more likely it is to be promoted. When the programmer notices that a program is running unstably, the operating system will be modified to ensure greater stability and efficiency. This means the political careers of incompetent or unfit officials will end. This is why you sometimes see the government silencing people, but eventually, the situation still moves towards a relatively good outcome. For instance, in the “Tangshan BBQ beating incident,” initially the local government tried to cool down the heat, but when higher-level authorities and the CCP intervened, the local government’s protectors were removed, and the perpetrators were sentenced to 24 years. The pandemic situation was similar: at first, the Wuhan local government tried to cool down the heat, but when the whole country focused on Wuhan, several responsible officials there were held accountable by the central government and their political careers ended.

    However, if the change in the program’s scope of action is due to the influence of external virus programs, even if the program’s actions seem right to you, the program must be terminated. Since the pandemic began in 2019, Zhang’s rhetoric has closely resembled that used by many foreign institutions, such as: calling for freedom, democracy, and denouncing CCP rule. The Chinese people do not care about this; we are more concerned with making money and improving our quality of life. It’s similar with the “Tank Man” incident: when foreign forces intervene, an internal conflict among the Chinese people becomes an external conflict between us and them. The economic conflicts of the 1990s, under the influence of Western powers, became an attempt to cause internal chaos in China through a “color revolution,” akin to a virus trying to turn the computer into a “zombie.” What do you think the programmer would do?

    Foreign intervention in China is a very sensitive topic, reminding people of the history from 1840 to 1949, a period of human-on-human predation. Those who collaborated with Western countries lived very well, but ordinary people suffered immensely; small-scale farming economies were crushed by industrial machines, and proxy wars among foreign agents caused widespread chaos. Have you ever thought about why the CCP was able to unify the entire country? Why do the Chinese people support the CCP? Understand these questions before discussing China. I am tired of hearing you talk about snippets about China from Western media. It’s time to read history books, starting from 1840 to the present, paying attention to the global situation outside China. Then you will understand why China has become what it is today.