High price for telling the truth

The sentencing by a Shanghai court of Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years’ imprisonment highlights the communist regime’s determination to snuff discussion about COVID-19’s origins. The ruthless sentence also shows the challenge facing a 10-member World Health Organisation scientific team that is due to travel to Wuhan next month to finally give effect to the World Health Assembly’s unanimous backing in May of Australia’s sensible call for a full investigation into the start and spread of the pandemic. As Scott Morrison has pointed out, China, no less than the rest of the world, stands to benefit from an independent scientific investigation into COVID-19’s origins to help prevent future pandemics.

On Monday, Ms Zhang, a 37-year-old former lawyer who from February 1 spent three months in Wuhan recording more than 120 video clips on the outbreak and the regime’s response, was charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. That is Chinese Communist Party claptrap to silence dissenters and consign them to jail.

Ms Zhang visited hospitals and crematoriums, interviewed frightened Wuhan locals, posted the videos on YouTube and shared her unique insights with foreign reporters. Her fearless accounts came as Beijing’s spin doctors were trying to persuade the world that President Xi Jinping was leading a heroic response that was effectively and transparently dealing with the pandemic. The reality, events showed, was different. And Ms Zhang’s videos did much to unmask the CCP’s brazen dishonesty. Her reporting alarmed Chinese authorities. In December last year, eight doctors in Wuhan who expressed concern about the virus were severely reprimanded. Mr Xi is believed to have known of human transmission in early January but Beijing remained silent until January 20, setting back the world’s response by vital weeks.

Ms Zhang went missing in mid-May. She eventually was found in prison. She went on a hunger strike but was force fed. She appeared in court on Monday in a wheelchair. Lawyers said she recited the Bible for comfort and “feels psychologically exhausted”. She and other citizen journalists deserve universal gratitude, not incarceration in a fetid Chinese prison.

Unsurprisingly, roadblocks aplenty have been put in the way of getting the WHO’s scientific team to Wuhan. Now that the investigation is set to go it must pay close attention to the fearless reporting of Ms Zhang and those like her who witnessed and helped expose the CCP’s shameless deceit.