Journalist who reported Wuhan vanishes after prison release

Zhang Zhan has not responded to attempts to make contact after the end of her four-year prison sentence for reporting on start of the pandemic.

Zhang Zhan, pictured before she was jailed, became a journalist after being disbarred from law.

A Chinese journalist who was due to be released from prison has disappeared after serving a sentence for reporting on the initial outbreak of coronavirus, campaigners say.

Zhang Zhan, 40, travelled to Wuhan, the pandemic’s presumed origin, as the virus began to spread in early 2020.

She was expected to be freed from Shanghai women’s prison on Monday after a four-year sentence but has not responded to ­attempts to contact her. Her family said it was “not convenient” to reply to requests for information, often a sign that people have been put under pressure by the police.

Two activists who intended to travel to the prison to meet her were stopped from doing so.

Reporters Without Borders fears she is being kept under a form of surveillance after being released. “They have probably moved her to another secure ­location to make sure she isn’t speaking to the media and that no one can find out where she is staying,” said Aleksandra Bielakowska, who is based in Taiwan for the charity. “She is very outspoken.”

Zhang started her career as a lawyer but was disbarred after taking up human rights cases. She then became a journalist and travelled from her home in Shanghai to Wuhan on February 1, 2020, as China began belatedly to lock down in response to the ­coronavirus.

The authorities at first denied the scale of the epidemic and took action against doctors who spoke out about it.

Zhang toured the city by bicycle, filming overflowing hospitals and overworked crematoriums.

She was arrested in May 2020 and jailed for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all charge often deployed against journalists and dissidents. Similar fates were doled out to a number of other “citizen journalists”.

Zhang received a harsher sentence than others, possibly ­because of her record. She had been arrested the year before for demonstrating in Shanghai in solidarity with Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters. By the time she went on trial in December 2020 she was on hunger strike. Her weight halved and she ­relented only after being admitted to hospital.

Shen Yanqiu, an activist, told Radio Free Asia that she had been summoned to meet senior communist party officials and told not to meet Zhang at the prison on her release. She said a police guard had been put outside her home.

Activists and writers face ­increasingly strict censure under President Xi Jinping’s rule, with a number going missing after completing prison sentences.

The Times