China Set to Release Woman Who Exposed COVID-19 in Wuhan After Four Years in Prison
Authorities in China were expected on Monday (May 13) to release a citizen journalist jailed for four years after she documented the early phases of the coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan in 2020.
Zhang Zhan, 40, had traveled to Wuhan in early 2020 from Shanghai where she was based, posting first-hand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets that painted a more dire picture of the outbreak than the official narrative.
After several months of reporting that included videos, she was detained in May 2020. She went on hunger strike in late June, prompting police to strap her hands and force-feed her with a tube, her lawyers said at the time.
In December 2020 she was convicted by a Shanghai court of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and sentenced to four years in prison.
