Chinese human rights website Weiquanwang has reported that lawyer-turned-citizen journalist Zhang Zhan has been detained again and is being held by authorities in Shanghai, just months after her release upon completing a four-year prison sentence. Following Zhang’s re-detention and transportation to Shanghai, Zhang’s attorney Fan Biaowen was also held and questioned by police for eight hours, and Zhang’s mother is currently incommunicado and thought to be under the control of police in Shanghai.
Targeted for her hard-hitting video reporting from Wuhan documenting the early days of the COVID pandemic, Zhang was convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and served four years in prison. During that time, she was in dangerously ill health due to periodic hunger strikes she held to protest her incarceration. Following her release in May of this year, Zhang vowed to continue her advocacy work, and expressed concern that her online speech was being monitored by authorities.
A statement from Amnesty International described the “depressingly predictable re-detention of Zhang Zhan” as a sign of the Chinese government’s increasing intolerance for dissent of any kind:
“The depressingly predictable re-detention of Zhang Zhan is the culmination of the government’s ongoing campaign of harassment against her, even after she was ‘freed’ from prison. Since being released, Zhang has been subjected to surveillance that has intensified over the past month,” Amnesty International’s China Director, Sarah Brooks, said.
[…] According to information received by Amnesty International, [Zhang] was regularly and repeatedly taken in for police questioning over the past month, with some interrogations lasting over 10 hours.
In late August, it was reported that she traveled from Shanghai to the northwestern province of Gansu to show solidarity with other human rights defenders. Shortly thereafter, during a visit to her hometown in Shaanxi, she suddenly became unreachable; civil society reported that she had been taken into custody by police from Shanghai, well over 1000km away.
“On 2 September, Zhang Zhan marked her 41st birthday – her first since being released. Yet instead of celebrating this hard-won reunion with her family, she has spent her fifth successive birthday deprived of liberty,” Sarah Brooks said. [Source]
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), referencing the Weiquanwang report, described the new charges against Zhang, as well as official harassment targeting her mother and her attorney. Zhang’s mother is reportedly incommunicado and is thought to be under the control of police in Shanghai:
On 20 September – a month after journalist and former lawyer Zhang Zhan was placed in detention and deprived of contact with the outside world – independent Chinese news website Weiquanwang revealed that Zhang is being held in the Pudong Detention Center in Shanghai for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a criminal offence for which she could face up to five years in prison.
On 19 September, Zhang’s lawyer Fan Biaowen was dragged away by policemen while meeting with Zhang’s mother in a metro station in the city of Shanghai. He was released after eight hours of detention in the local police station. The police also briefly held Zhang’s mother in the metro station.
Zhang was apprehended by the police on 28 August while travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. In the weeks leading up to this incident, Zhang had shared news about the harassment of 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. [Source]