Zhang Zhan, sentenced to 4-years by Shanghai Court for reporting on pandemic outbreak

Chinese Citizen Journalist Jailed For 4 Years For Wuhan Virus Reports

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was sentenced at a brief hearing in a Shanghai court for allegedly "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" for her reporting in the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak.

Shanghai:

Updated: December 28, 2020

A Chinese citizen journalist was jailed for four years Monday for her reporting from Wuhan as the Covid-19 outbreak unfurled, her lawyer said, almost a year after details of an "unknown viral pneumonia" surfaced in the central China city.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was sentenced at a brief hearing in a Shanghai court for allegedly "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" during her reporting in the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak.

Her live reports and essays were shared on social media platforms in February, grabbing the attention of authorities, who have punished eight virus whistleblowers so far as they defang criticism of the government's response to the outbreak.

Beijing has congratulated itself for "extraordinary" success in controlling the virus inside its borders, with an economy on the rebound while much of the rest of the world stutters through painful lockdowns and surging caseloads a year on from the start of the pandemic in Wuhan.

Controlling the information flow during an unprecedented global health crisis has been pivotal in allowing China's communist authorities to reframe the narrative in their favour, with President Xi Jinping being garlanded for his leadership by the country's ruling party.

But that has come at a serious cost to anyone who has picked holes in the official storyline.

The court said Zhang Zhan had spread "false remarks" online, according to one of her lawyers Zhang Keke, but the prosecution did not fully divulge its evidence in court.

"We had no way of understanding what exactly Zhang Zhan was accused of doing," he added, describing it as "a speedy, rushed hearing."

In return the defendant "didn't respond [to questions]... She refused to answer when the judge asked her to confirm her identity."

The defendant's mother sobbed loudly as the verdict was read out, Ren Quanniu, another member of Zhang's defence team, told reporters who were barred from entering the court.

Concerns are mounting over the health of 37-year-old Zhang, who began a hunger strike in June and has been force-fed via a nasal tube.

Her legal team said her health was in decline and she suffered from headaches, dizziness and stomach pain, and that she had appeared in court in a wheelchair.

"She said when I visited her (last week): 'If they give me a heavy sentence then I will refuse food until the very end.'... She thinks she will die in prison,"Ren said before the trial.

"It's an extreme method of protesting against this society and this environment."

China's communist authorities have a history of putting dissidents on trial in opaque courts between Christmas and New Year in an effort to minimise Western scrutiny.

Example made

The sentencing comes just weeks before an international team of World Health Organization experts is expected to arrive in China to investigate the origins of Covid-19.

Zhang was critical of the early response in Wuhan, writing in a February essay that the government "didn't give people enough information, then simply locked down the city".

"This is a great violation of human rights," she wrote.

Rights groups and embassies have also drawn attention to her case, although diplomats from several countries were denied requests to monitor the hearing. "Zhang Zhan's case raises serious concerns about media freedom in China," the British embassy in Beijing said, urging "China to release all those detained for their reporting."

Authorities "want to use her case as an example to scare off other dissidents from raising questions about the pandemic situation in Wuhan earlier this year", added Leo Lan, research and advocacy consultant at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders NGO.

Zhang is the first of a group of four citizen journalists detained by authorities after reporting from Wuhan to face trial.

Previous attempts by AFP to contact the other three -- Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua -- were unsuccessful.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Faking The News

by Les May

I HAVE no great enthusiasm for China as a country or its politicians. Perhaps it is its history and culture which make me feel that some of its leader think of we Westerners as barbarians or perhaps they are truly racist in outlook. But this suspicion does not lead me to accept without good evidence that China failed to alert the rest of the world to the dangers of the SARS-Cov-2 virus which arose in the country and hence is responsible for what is happening to us.

It is instructive to look at the delay between a country becoming aware of the presence of the virus and imposing a ‘lockdown’. But first let’s clear up the story about the doctor being ‘silenced’ when he revealed the story.

‘Dr Li raised the alarm about novel coronavirus on 30 December when he sent a message to his medical school alumni group warning them to wear protective clothing.

Dr Li told them seven patients from a local seafood market had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in hospital.
A screenshot of the message went viral on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, and he and seven others were accused of "rumour-mongering" by Wuhan police who tried to silence him.’

https://news.sky.com/story/chinese-doctor-li-wenliang-who-was-punished-for-early-coronavirus-warning-dies-of-disease-11927777

But that does not mean that no action was being taken in China. This what the European Centre of Disease Control (ECDC) has to say:

On 31 December 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China, reported a cluster of 27 pneumonia cases (including seven severe cases) of unknown aetiology, with a common reported link to Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wholesale fish and live animal market.

The market was closed down on 1 January 2020. According to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, samples from the market tested positive for novel coronavirus. Cases showed symptoms such as fever, dry cough, dyspnoea; radiological findings showed bilateral lung infiltrates.
On 9 January 2020, the China CDC reported that a novel coronavirus (later named SARS-CoV-2, (the virus causing COVID-19) had been detected as the causative agent for 15 of the 59 cases of pneumonia. On 10 January 2020, the first novel coronavirus genome sequence was made publicly available.
On 23 January 2020, Wuhan City was locked down – with all travel in and out of Wuhan prohibited – and movement inside the city was restricted

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/novel-coronavirus/event-background-2019

This suggests that the time between the first cases of Covid 19 being identified in China and a ‘lockdown’ being imposed was 23 days.

So what happened in the USA and Western Europe? These figures for the delay in imposing a ‘lockdown’ include also the cumulative number of deaths in the country at the time it was imposed. In the case of Germany and the USA, which each have a federal system, I have used the first date when it appears to have been imposed in the country.

Austria 22 days, 3 deaths; Netherlands 28 days, 276 deaths; Italy 37 days, 366 deaths; Spain 44 days, 294 deaths; France 51 days, 175 deaths; UK 51 days, 379 deaths; Germany 52 days, 31 deaths; USA 60 days, 522 deaths.

NB These figures were compiled for several sources which do not always agree with each other.

How well do these figures for Western Europe compare with China moving from first cases to lockdown? We still have a lot to learn about the origins and early spread of this virus. If western leaders made mistakes in their response to this pandemic it is they who are responsible for what is happening not China.

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Why We Should Be China Centric

by Les May

WRITING on the Conservative Home blog Damian Green MP has said ‘The World Health Organisation, as the Coronavirus crisis has developed, has seemed to be completely indulgent towards the Chinese authorities while being ever-ready (as they should be) to criticise other governments, and that the Chinese authorities were ‘dilatory in informing the WHO about the outbreak’.

https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/03/damian-green-coronavirus-huawei-and-what-to-do-about-china-in-the-long-term.html

Green’s claims seem to be written more from prejudice than a quest for accuracy. This is what the Al Jazeera news channel has to say.

‘On December 31 last year, China alerted the WHO to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.  The virus was unknown.’

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/timeline-china-coronavirus-spread-200126061554884.html

And the WHO tends to confirm this.

https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19

The full genetic sequence of the new virus, essential for the development of a test for infection by the virus, was released on 5 January 2020 based on a sample swab taken from a patient in December 2018 (probably 26 December)

You will note that at that time it was referred to as the ‘Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus’ which is unsurprising as it was previously and unknown virus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947.2

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/06/health/china-pneumonia-intl-hnk/index.html

This points to doctors and researchers in China being initially mystified by the new illness and working to find out more about it, rather than to ‘dilatoriness’.  As for the WHO being ‘indulgent’ to China I’m not sure what Green has in mind.

Green of course is not the only politician to blame China for the ongoing pandemic, Donald Trump initially adopted a similar stance but now seems to have chosen to direct his ire at the WHO for ‘Calling it wrong’, which is a bit rich coming from a man who takes no notice of anyone who actually knows what they are talking about.

I take a different view. For 76 days after 23 January China conducted a massive experiment on its own population at no cost to us or the rest of the world.  To tackle the Covid19 pandemic it introduced what has come to be known as a ‘lockdown’ instructing the residents of Wuhan not to leave their homes. As this seemed to be effective in reducing the infection rate other countries introduced similar measures. Having reduced the number of person to person transmission of the virus to a very low level, China is now conducting a second experiment by a phased lifting the restrictions on the population, again at no cost to us or anyone else in the world.  They are experimenting with one possible ‘Exit Strategy’. We should be watching what is happening in China in the next few weeks very carefully to see if it works.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/07/asia/coronavirus-wuhan-lockdown-lifted-intl-hnk/index.html

Thankfully we have not emulated China’s methods of imposing a 76 day lockdown.  But there is the dilemma.  The more complete the lockdown the more effective at reducing the infection rate it will be and the shorter the time it will be necessary for it to be in place.  China is totalitarian and coercive, we are a democracy, and work by persuasion and consent. If we want to prove that our system is superior we’ve got to accept social distancing and no unnecessary journeys out of the house.  The more we flout these rules the less effective the lockdown will be and the longer it will have to last to achieve the desired result.

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