Today a number of U.S. aligned non government organizations launched an anti-China campaign in Germany.
Reporters Without Boarders (RSF) led the campaign together with PEN, Amnesty International and a Germany journalist union. They called for an hour long tweet storm to demand of that German politicians should act to get the Chinese 'journalist' Zhang Zhan released from prison in China.
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The campaign was somewhat successful. A search for the #ZhangZhan hashtag used show that a lot of ill informed people, including many journalists, tweeted or retweeted the issue.
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The misinformation spread by Robin Alexander in the above tweet is pretty heavy but not unusual.
Zhang Zhan is not a journalist. She was not one of the first to post video from Wuhan. She did not report on the COVID-19 but protested against the successful lockdown. She is not in jail for that reason.
The German news sites Süddeutsche Zeitung and Spiegel report about the RSF campaign. Those news reports are even worse than the re-tweets. The Spiegel, for example, claims that Zhang Zhan was 'tortured and imprisoned for her reporting of the Chinese government's bad handling of the plague.'
Germany has exceeded 100,000 deaths from Covid and is currently in a record breaking 4th wave. China has had less than 5,000 death and is free of Covid. Given that it seems pretty lunatic to me to accuse China of a 'bad handling of the plague'. Also – to my knowledge no 'torture' has ever been alleged to have happened in the Zhang Zhan case. The Spiegel made that up.
We looked at the Zhang Zhan case in December 2020 when the 'mighty Wurlitzer' played her song simultaneously in many major media including the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, CBSnews and Sky.
The Trump loving anti-China Epoch Times subtitled the video Zhang Zhan had made when she, in early February of 2020, went from Shanghai to Wuhun which was under strict but successful lockdown. It also described and translated it:
Location: Wuhan City, Hubei Province
Zhang Zhan, a female dissident living in Shanghai, put herself in harm’s way to go to Wuhan after the city was locked down. Her plan was to investigate and broadcast the local situation as a citizen journalist. She is outraged that the Chinese government casually deprives the basic rights and freedom of Wuhan residents in the name of epidemic control.
Woman: Let me ask you,
Do you think the government can treat citizens like animals?
Lock them when the regime is willing to,
Send them out to work when they need these people to work.
Aren’t you treating them like you treat cattle and horses?
When animals need to graze you let them out
And take them back when they are done eating.
Is that for real?
And if they do not obey, whip them.
Is that how it should be?
Is it justified to treat civilians like this?Man: What are you doing?
Woman: I want to express my protest against the government, persistent protest.
Immediately before the man asked 'what are you doing' Zhang Zhan is seen in the video intentionally knocking over a traffic barrier at a health checkpoint.
Zhang Zhan was not 'reporting'. She was, in her own words, expressing persistent protest against the government. She did so while filming that protest to then upload it on Youtube and Twitter (both of which are blocked in China).
Zhang Zhan was not arrested at that time though she probably should have been. In a different piece the Epoch Times explains:
On May 13, Zhang posted a YouTube video in which she spoke in front of the Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan. In the video, she criticized the local government’s plan to roll out virus testing at $180 yuan (about $25) per person as too high a price, noting that locals had been under lockdown for months.
She added that while human rights have been trampled during the outbreak, people would likely be willing to foot the bill in hopes of proving they were virus free. In order to pass security checkpoints in many cities, citizens must present a mobile-app-generated code that proves they are virus-free.
She also called out intimidation tactics adopted by Wuhan authorities to try to control the spread of the virus, saying they were a “sorrow of the country.”
A day later, she went missing.
All testing in China during the various outbreaks has been free of charge. In mid May there was a small new outbreak in Wuhan with a total of six cases of Covid-19 identified. Zhang Zhan was quoted at that time on the CIA's Radio Free Asia website with the false claim that 'There are signs of a resurgence of the epidemic in Wuhan.'
Zhang Zhan was arrested in May 2020 for spreading fake news about a government test-for-money plan that did not exist and other false Covid claims she had made. It was not the first time that Zhang Zhan had got herself into trouble. She had a short stint in prison in late 2019 also under the charge of 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble', a law that covers spreading fakenews on the Internet.
The South China Morning Post reported that, while in jail, Zhang Zhan went on 'intermitted hunger strike' (whatever that may mean). In December 2020 she was sentenced to four years in prison:
The sentence was in response to reports that she live-streamed from Wuhan on social media platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, which are both blocked in China.
She also wrote an article critical of the official response to the outbreak, accusing authorities of infringing people’s rights and covering up the severity of the epidemic.
Her coverage was deemed “maliciously fabricated content and false information” and she became the first so-called citizen journalist tried by a Chinese court for reporting on the coronavirus outbreaks in the city.
The World Health Organization has warned of the danger of false information during a pandemic:
An infodemic can have direct negative impacts on the health of populations and the public health response by undermining the trust in science and interventions. We are also seeing that infodemics hinder the cohesiveness of societies by increasing existing social inequities, stigma, gender disparity and generational rift.
The WHO called on governments to take 'measures to counter misinformation and disinformation'.
China did that when it finally arrested Zhang Zhan and put the repeating offender into prison.
Zhang Zhan is a 'dissident' who has protested against the sensible epidemic measures the Chinese government took to defeat the pandemic within its country. The 'former Christian lawyer' Zhang Zha has similar radical libertarian opinions about pandemic measures as the 'Querdenker' (lit. 'lateral thinkers') in Germany who protest against wearing masks and lockdowns and the various Covid deniers and radical anti-vaxers elsewhere.
RSF has just awarded Zhang Zha, among others, its Press Freedom Award 2021.
That RSF, Amnesty, Pen and the DJU support her cause says a lot about those organizations' lack of integrity.