China Fang Bin, detained for documenting the Covid pandemic, released three years later

Fang Bin became famous for recording the first corpses of the pandemic in its epicenter, the Chinese city of Wuhan

China Fang Bin, detained for documenting the Covid pandemic, released three years later

Fang Bin became famous for recording the first corpses of the pandemic in its epicenter, the Chinese city of Wuhan. Although he worked as a textile merchant, in the networks he was labeled a "citizen journalist" for trying to document what was happening when the virus was circulating, within a city that was experiencing an unprecedented confinement until then, still had no name.

But Fang, like so many others who followed in his footsteps, disappeared in February 2020. It was not known until more than a year later that he had been sentenced, in a secret trial in Wuhan, to three years in prison.

Last Sunday, according to various media reports, Fang was released. Information confirmed to this newspaper by a human rights lawyer who, since the arrests in Wuhan, has been in close contact with the families of the "citizen journalists" who were arrested for sharing videos of what was happening in those first and confusing weeks of the pandemic. .

"He is at his home in Wuhan, but in relative freedom because agents from the Ministry of Public Security have him under surveillance all day. He knows that if he makes noise again they will put him back in jail," says the lawyer. His conviction, which was never made public, was based on the offense of "picking fights and causing trouble," a common charge in China used to silence dissent, which can carry a sentence of up to five years.

Fang started posting videos on YouTube and giving interviews to some foreign media on January 25, 2020. "Honestly, I didn't know something was seriously wrong until the city was quarantined. I went to the biggest hospital and it was full of people, but at no point did I see local TV cameras there asking people what's wrong. what was happening. So I thought: if they don't want to go, I will go to all the hospitals and film what is happening," Fang explained in a statement to France24.

On February 1 of that year, he visited the four major hospitals in Wuhan, where he recorded the first unfiltered images of the scenes that were later experienced in hospitals around the world: patients lying in the corridors of centers with no beds available, men and women getting IVs in waiting rooms, doctors running around relentlessly... and a funeral van picking up bodies. She counted eight in five minutes. Her videos swept the networks with more than a million views.

That day, six men in white protective suits, claiming to be from the Center for Disease Control, showed up at Fang's house with the excuse that they needed to take his temperature. When he opened it, they arrested him and took his computer and the two mobile phones with which he recorded.

At the police station, Fang was questioned and reprimanded by officers for "igniting a nuclear bomb" and for failing to report "positive things." He was released at dawn. But, after continuing to post videos of him, he finally disappeared on February 9. Nothing was heard from him until, a year later, some websites run by Chinese dissidents in the United States claimed that Fang had been sentenced to prison.

Fang is one of the list of "citizen journalists" who were detained in Wuhan. Zhang Zhan, a lawyer and activist, was sentenced in December 2020 to four years in prison also for "stirring fights and stirring up trouble."

Another lawyer had more luck, Chen Qiushi, arrested in February of that year as he left a hospital in Wuhan from where he was broadcasting for his followers on social networks. Weeks later, the police placed him under a kind of house arrest at his family home in the east coast city of Qingdao, on the condition that he could only go outside with permission. Chen reappeared in September 2021 in a video broadcast on a friend's YouTube channel, claiming that he had suffered from depression.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project