The Coronavirus Outbreak Has Given Beijing A New Tool To Suppress Dissent

1. His friend maintains his Twitter account and has started a White House petition calling for China to release Chen and Fang, because “based on the Chinese government’s notoriety, local officials may claim them as dead from the virus.” It’s ironic that Chinese people have to appeal to the American government to seek justice for their fellow citizens.
2. Family and friends of Chen Qiushi, a Chinese citizen journalist, believe Beijing put Chen into a medical quarantine camp against his will due to his real-time reporting of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, even though he appeared to be healthy.
3. Chen uploaded several videos of the protests to his Weibo account and told an interviewer from “This American Life,” an American radio show, that he painstakingly avoided taking sides, had never criticized Beijing, and never offered any public support of the protesters.
4. Chen Visits Wuhan to Report on Coronavirus This January, when Chen heard about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and that the city would be under lockdown, he jumped on the last train from Beijing to Wuhan while other people were desperately trying to leave the city.
5. He managed to bypass China’s internet firewall and established his own YouTube channel, saying in one video, “In a … mature country, the problem is not that there are people talking about ‘sensitive topics.’ The problem is the existence of such ‘sensitive topics.’” Chen believes the only way to change that is to keep talking about these issues.
6. Chen was asked to give a detailed account of his trip to Hong Kong, was questioned, recorded, and “criticized and educated.” According to him, public security officials and police officers switched their interrogation tactics between intimidation and paternalistic persuasion.
7. Since Chinese state-owned media have to follow the government line and focus their reporting on government efforts, Chen’s unfiltered short videos let people around the world bypass the propaganda to see what’s really going on in Wuhan: crowded hospitals, desperate patients, death, and body bags.
8. In his last Hong Kong recording, he explained that since his videos of the protests were uploaded and shared, he received nonstop phone calls from his lawyers association, China’s Department of Public Security, and Beijing police.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/06/the-coronavirus-outbreak-has-given-beijing-a-new-tool-to-suppress-dissent/