Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist, was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday (Dec. 28). Zhang Zhan, who is extremely weak due to a prolonged hunger strike and needs a wheelchair to appear in court, was in tears after hearing the verdict. Zhang Zhan’s mother told RTHK that the authorities wanted to put her daughter to death.
Zhang Zhan, 37, was sentenced to four years in prison for picking quarrels and provoking trouble at the Pudong New Area Court in Shanghai on Monday morning. 37-year-old Zhang Zhan was in Wuhan from February to May this year to cover the new pneumonia epidemic, including posting videos of Wuhan’s streets, hospitals and communities on the Internet, which the authorities accused of “publishing false information”. During his detention, Zhang Zhan went on a hunger strike to protest.
Zhang Zhan in wheelchair in court in tears after hearing the verdict
Zhang’s mother, Ms. Shao, cried outside the courtroom after the verdict was announced. In a telephone interview with Radio Free Asia, she said that as a mother, she was saddened to see her daughter, who has been on hunger strike for seven months, appearing in court in a wheelchair: “She was sentenced to four years in prison, and she went there in a wheelchair, they (the authorities) are inhumane. She was facing the judge, and we sat behind her, so we couldn’t see her face. Basically, she (Zhang Zhan) didn’t answer any questions either. Her head was always tilted, and she had no energy. She was so thin that she was skin and bones. I saw her wipe her tears, and the judge said to take the offender down, and then pushed her away.”
On that day, Zhang Zhan’s father and mother were present at the hearing. Once she talked about her daughter’s sickness, Zhang’s mother couldn’t hold back any longer. She said, “How could they (authorities) bear to do something so cruel. I wanted to tell the judge that in Zhang Zhan’s condition, could we be more humane and let her recover outside, but the judge walked away. When I came out, there were a lot of police at the door, and I didn’t know what was happening and why the lawyers were dispersed. They couldn’t hear me on the phone either.”
Two lawyers lost contact with the outside world after the verdict
We repeatedly called Zhang Keke and Ren Quanniu, the two lawyers representing Zhang Zhan in the case, but they were never available. Zhang Keke had met with Zhang Zhan last Friday, and he said publicly after the meeting that Zhang Zhan had lost so much weight that he looked very different from the photo before he was jailed. He wrote: “Last week, lawyer Ren Quanniu came to meet with me and said he had lost so much weight that he was ‘out of shape’, which I thought was exaggerated. I didn’t expect that when I saw him again, he was almost as he described.”
The indictment accuses Zhang Zhan of “posting false information” on overseas social media platforms Twitter and Oil Tube and giving interviews to overseas media. Zhang admitted the facts but refused to plead guilty. The charges are that she “did not make up any false information”, but that she personally went to the communities near Wuhan Railway Station, drugstores or supermarkets in other places, and interviewed Wuhan residents in person to learn first-hand information, including the quality of vegetables and the cost of nucleic acid.
Zhang’s mother broke her silence blaming herself for gullible police promises
The first time to break the silence, the media interviewed Zhang Zhan’s mother said that for more than seven months, she refused to be interviewed by the foreign media in order to supposedly cooperate with the state security, but the judge still re-sentenced her daughter: “They want to put you to death, they are not sentencing, they are trying to put Zhang Zhan to death. Because of Zhang Zhan’s physical condition, they know very well. I did not cooperate with the lawyer before, I cooperated with the police. I think I fell for it. I didn’t expect the sentence to be too heavy.”
Public security outside the court like a big enemy
Before the trial, many people from all over the world gathered outside the court to show solidarity, while the police were like a big enemy, deploying a large number of plainclothes officers to drive people away. Some journalists from foreign media, including Reuters, were taken to the police station for questioning, and Li Dawei, a rights lawyer who had arrived in Shanghai from Gansu the day before, was taken away by police outside the courthouse. He told the station, “At that time I wanted to go in to observe, but they did not allow it, they said the judge must agree before I could go in to observe.”
According to people at the scene, among those arrested that day were British and Japanese media reporters. Shanghai rights activist Shen Yanqiu told us, “There were police and plainclothes officers at the exit of the subway and in front of the courthouse, and He Jiawei, a citizen of Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, was detained by police at the Century Square police station, and a reporter was also arrested.
Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was suspended from practicing law as well as criminally detained for criticizing the official system. Zhang Zhan is the first citizen journalist in China to be sentenced for reporting on the Wuhan epidemic. Another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, also a lawyer, disappeared after arriving in Wuhan in February this year, and another citizen journalist, Fang Bin, is still missing.
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