A Shanghai-based journalist who reported on the Chinese communist regime’s attempt to censor early reports of the emergent coronavirus faces up to five years of imprisonment, according to a new report on the prosecution’s aims.
“She is now being accused of fabricating malicious and false information about the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan and accepting interviews with overseas media,” a source told the South China Morning Post.
Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer who reported from Wuhan in the early days of the outbreak, stands accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” She used social media to put a spotlight on “the detentions of other independent reporters and harassment of families of victims seeking accountability from the epicenter,” according to the nonprofit Chinese Human Rights Defenders, and could head to trial next month.
“We will be pleading not guilty based on her right to freedom of speech,” lawyer Wen Yu told Radio Free Asia in September.
China’s heavy-handed suppression of coronavirus information sparked a wave of complaints about a lack of free speech in the authoritarian regime, most dramatically from the doctor who was punished for sounding the initial alarm and then subsequently contracted the novel contagion and died. “A healthy society should not only have one kind of voice,” Dr. Li Wenliang said before he died.
President Trump’s national security team has put a spotlight on China’s censorship throughout the pandemic, with one senior official likening Li to the May 4th Movement’s protest against the Versailles Treaty that transferred German holdings in China to Japan’s custody after World War I.
“To my mind, the heirs of May Fourth are civic-minded citizens who commit small acts of bravery,” White House deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger said in a Mandarin-language address in May. “When small acts of bravery are stamped out by governments, big acts of bravery follow.”
Chinese officials, after their initial stumble, have emphasized that the high-profile doctor was a member of the Chinese Communist Party in an effort to blunt the idea that he represents a dissident outlook.
“Some hostile forces, aiming to attack the CPC and the Chinese government, have given Li labels including an anti-establishment ‘champion’ — which is completely untrue,” China’s official anti-corruption agency, the National Supervisory Commission, said through state-run media in March. “Those hostile forces with ulterior motives, who tried to stir up trouble, delude people, and instigate public emotions, are doomed to fail.”
That context makes Zhang’s persistent criticism more unwelcome in Beijing. “Her family and friends are gravely concerned that she will receive a heavy sentence because of her defiance,” an SCMP source said.
