cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2541440
On 1 September, independent Chinese news website ‘Weiquanwang’ revealed that journalist and former lawyer Zhang Zhan is being held in Pudong Detention Center in Shanghai, the NGO Reporters Without Borders reports.
The journalist was apprehended by police while she was travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China on 28 August. Since that time she has not answered her phone or updated her social media accounts where she had recently resumed posting.
No official reason has been given for her detention, but in the weeks prior to this incident, Zhang Zhan had been sharing news about the harassment of other activists in China on social media. She had also travelled to the northwestern province of Gansu to persuade the mother of a recently arrested activist to sign a power of attorney.
Zhang Zhan was initially arrested in May 2020, while covering the early stages of the Covid 19 outbreak in Wuhan, in central-eastern China. She had posted more than 100 videos on social media before her arrest on 14 May 2020, and seven months later was sentenced to four years in prison by a Shanghai court on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
[…] During her early months of detention, Zhang Zhan nearly died after going on a total hunger strike to protest her situation. Prison officials forcibly fed her through a nasal tube and sometimes left her handcuffed for days.
China, the world’s biggest prison for journalists and press freedom defenders with at least 120 currently behind bars, is ranked 172nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
If they won’t standup and demand their government change it’s track 180°, it’s their own damn fault.
It’s the same logic used to blame Americans for their leadership’s failures, and I am all for an egalitarian worldview that treats each country by the weight of their merits and transgressions.
RIP uyghurs 🤷
Equating this to the USA is way off the mark. If an American isn’t happy with their government they have any number of recourses, like voting for someone else, protesting, or running for office (or all of the above, and more). At the very least, they know they won’t be thrown in prison for publicly disagreeing with their government. None of those is an option in China — it’s a one-party police state where protesting is illegal and the political apparatus is so incestuous that it’s essentially impossible for a “nobody” to break in. The weight and omnipresence of “the state” is hard to describe until you feel it in person. It’s soul-crushing.
Edit: tankies, don’t come at me with “ackshually there are lots of parties in China”. I know how their congress works.
Every law and right is written in blood in the US. They might need to bleed more to have the same.
That really undersells the work and sacrifice that happened during the Enlightenment in Europe. The US inherited that — they didn’t create it.
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
How are the so-called ‘laws’ written in China?
Meanwhile US having a hard time not voting for corrupt convicted felon insurrectionists to come finish off democracy and equal rights
I disagree, I think you’re looking at it with a Western perspective. Just like with Russia, they’ve never experienced democracy and have been indoctrinated to think that their way of doing things is better. It’s a really big ask for enough Chinese people to risk everything to overthrow their authoritarian regime and, even if they were to do so, there’s no guarantee that whatever would come next would be an improvement.
Insert “tiananmen square massacre” footage here
@YeetPics@mander.xyz
Zhang Zhan is a role model for a person who is standing up. As some others have already written in their comments, it’s a similar situation in China as it is in Russia, Iran, North Korea (or Nazi-Germany 90 years ago, if you seek an example in history).