The text messages sent to the Chinese activist from ordinary citizens from Wuhan makes one request – to sue the Chinese governments. Among the citizens who have spoken up are people who have lost their mothers because of coronavirus as hospitals refuse to admit her and people whose fathers have died in Quarantine.
The seven residents who had reached out to the activist Yang Zhanqing have suddenly changed their minds or even stopped responding. According to Yang, at least two of the seven residents have been threatened by the police. The accusations of Chinese authorities clamping down on dissenters who are speaking against the Communist government on its mishandling of the novel coronavirus outbreak have been going on. Lawyers have been warned against filing suit while volunteers who dared to go against the censorship of the state have been disappeared. Yang who has fled China after he was detained for a while, now lives in New York. He said,
“They are worried that if people defend their rights, the international community will know what the real situation is like in Wuhan and the true experiences of the families there.”
Harassment against those who have lost people
The Chinese propaganda machinery, to evoke patriotic emotion in people, has begun to portray the coronavirus victims as martyrs. The censors have even deleted Chinese news that has exposed officials’ early efforts to hide the outbreak. Three volunteers of the Terminus2049, an online project group that has been archiving censored news from China about the outbreak, have been missing in Beijing since the last month. Chen Kun, brother of Chen Mei who is one of the disappeared, said,
“I had previously told him: ‘You guys probably face some risk doing this project.’ But I didn’t know how much. I had said that maybe he would be summoned by the police for a talk, and they would ask him to take down the site. I didn’t think it would be this serious.”
Volunteers of similar online projects have been summoned and questioned by the local police authorities. In private messages to each other, such communities have warned others of facing similar action by the authorities. In Hubei province where Wuhan lies, police arrested a woman for organizing a protest against high prices of vegetables. An official at a Wuhan hospital was removed from his post after he criticized the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was promoted by the authorities to treat coronavirus.
The crackdown of this scale and intent has been harassment for people who have lost their family members due to the novel coronavirus. Zhang Hai who is certain that his father who passed away recently was infected with the coronavirus hospital says he still supports the Communist party but believes the local officials should be held responsible.
Source: The Times of India
