Chinese blogger Zhang Zhan, imprisoned for four years for publishing videos criticizing China’s health policy during the Covid-19 pandemic, has been released, the NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF) announced on Wednesday, May 22. According to human rights organizations, this forty-year-old former lawyer, sometimes presented as a citizen journalist, remains under surveillance, and her freedom of movement remains restricted.
Zhang Zhan traveled in February 2020 to Wuhan, the metropolis in central China where the virus responsible for Covid-19 was discovered. The city’s approximately 14 million inhabitants were then prohibited from leaving it. Smartphone in hand, the blogger notably went to the bottom of the buildings, where barriers had been erected, guards having been recruited in order to keep residents confined to their homes.
In her videos, published on Chinese and foreign sites, she challenged the personnel responsible for implementing the authorities’ health policy, which she considered “a serious violation of human rights”.
“Incitement to trouble”
Arrested in May 2020, she was convicted at the end of the same year for “provoking unrest”, a terminology often used against figures disturbing those in power. Zhang Zhan was scheduled to be released on May 13. But no information had been published until then regarding his fate.
A short video showing the blogger, released Wednesday by Reporters Without Borders, seems to indicate that she was released as planned. “At 5 a.m. on May 13, the police dropped me off at my older brother’s house in Shanghai,” she says in the video. “Thank you everyone for your help and concern,” she emphasizes. RSF claims to have obtained this video “through an intermediary”.
While Zhang Zhan appears to have been released, “her contacts with the outside world and her daily life are under surveillance,” Jane Wang, an activist based in the United Kingdom who participated in the campaign for release, said on the social network from the blogger.
For its part, “Reporters Without Borders remains concerned by his situation and emphasizes that partial freedom is not freedom at all,” the organization said on Wednesday. Human rights activists had expressed concern about the health of Zhang Zhan, who had led a hunger strike in prison to denounce his conviction.