On hunger strike, the 38-year-old whistleblower is very thin and “risk of not living very long”, her brother warned on Twitter last week. She had been sentenced to four years in prison after covering the Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan.
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Chinese “citizen journalist” Zhang Zhan, imprisoned after filming the quarantine of Wuhan, the world’s first city to be struck by Covid-19, is near death, her family has warned.
Zhan Zhang, 38, is on hunger strike after being sentenced to four years in prison at the end of 2020 for “causing public disorder”, a motive frequently cited in China against political opponents. She is now very thin and “risk of not living very long”, his brother, Zhang Ju, warned last week on Twitter, adding that“she may not make it through the winter”. “It seems that for her there is only God who matters, and the truths in which she believes”, he wrote, specifying that he had prayed to his sister in her letters of “take care of her”.
In February 2020, this former Shanghai lawyer went to Wuhan, in central China, to report on the situation there a few days after the quarantine of the metropolis of 11 million inhabitants. His images of patients bedridden in the corridor of an overcrowded hospital had given a rare glimpse of the sanitary conditions in the city plagued by Sars-CoV-2.
Asked about this on Friday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not provide any details on the state of health of Zhang Zhan. A spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, assured that “China is a rule of law”. “Anyone who breaks the law must be punished”, he said in front of the press, describing the calls for the release of Zhang Zhan of “anti-Chinese political manipulation”.