A Chinese citizen-journalist who was sentenced in 2020 to four years in prison for disseminating “false” information regarding the Covid-19 outbreak in the central city of Wuhan has been released, according to her supporters.
Zhang Zhan, 40, was taken by police to her elder brother’s home in Shanghai earlier this month and now has only limited freedom, the supporters said on Tuesday.
In a video posted on X, Zhang thanked everyone for their assistance while holding back tears.
Zhang travelled from Shanghai to Wuhan in February 2020 to cover the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. In dozens of short videos that she live-streamed and uploaded on Twitter, YouTube and other social media, she documented overflowing hospitals, empty shops, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, crematoria, the detention of independent journalists and harassment of families of victims of the pandemic seeking accountability.
The lawyer-turned-journalist was arrested in May 2020 and convicted in December of the same year of disrupting public order. Prosecutors claimed she had disseminated “a large number of lies and spoken with foreign media about infections with malicious intent”.
Zhang was expected to be released from a Shanghai prison on May 13, but the authorities did not provide any information as to her whereabouts over the following days.
On May 16, the US State Department said that Washington was “deeply concerned” about reports of her disappearance in the days after her expected release and called on Beijing to respect her human rights.
Following the confirmation of her release, Reporters without Borders (RSF), an international media watchdog group, said it remains worried about her situation as Zhang continues to be under strict surveillance by the authorities.
RSF on several occasions called for Zhang’s release and warned about the ill treatment she faced while in prison. During her first months in detention, Zhang almost died after going on a total hunger strike, the group said. Prison officials forcibly fed her through a nasal tube and sometimes left her handcuffed for days.
When Zhang’s mother visited her in prison in July 2023, she was very weak and weighed only 37 kilogrammes, half of what she weighed prior to detention, said RSF.