A reporter risked her life to show the world Covid in Wuhan. Now she may not survive jail.
It was dark as Zhang Zhan walked along the building in Wuhan, China, a constant, dull roar in the background.
“It’s 12:40 a.m. The sound of the funeral home’s crematorium,” she said in the February 2020 video, one of dozens she posted on YouTube. “They work day and night.”
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when the Chinese government was trying to contain the initial outbreak, reporting by citizen journalists like Zhang questioned the scale of the crisis and the government’s response. But they worried their aggressive reporting wouldn’t be tolerated for long in a country where the news media is strictly controlled.
“At the moment it’s OK,” Zhang said of her critical coverage in a May 2020 interview with an independent filmmaker, which was shared with NBC News. “They didn’t arrest me. However, if I continue with this, I don’t know their bottom line.”
Zhang went missing that month. Her lawyer later confirmed to NBC News that she had been convicted the following December of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” by a court in Shanghai where she was jailed for four years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/reporter-risked-her-life-show-093019646.html
