Chinese Vlogger Detailing Life – and Death — Amid Coronavirus Outbreak in Wuhan Disappears, Allegedly ‘Forcibly Quarantined’

(BEIJING) — After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell. Chen Qiushi looked haggard and disheveled in his online posts, an almost unrecognizable shadow of the energetic young man who had rolled into Wuhan on a self-assigned mission to tell its inhabitants’ stories, just as authorities locked the city down almost three weeks ago. Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Should Bring Out the Best in Humanity Until he disappeared last week, the 34-year-old lawyer-turned-video blogger was one of the most visible pioneers in a small but dogged movement that is defying the ruling Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information. Armed with smart phones and social media accounts, these citizen-journalists are telling their stories and those of others from Wuhan and other locked-down virus zones in Hubei province. The scale of this non-sanctioned storytelling is unprecedented in any previous major outbreak or disaster in China. It presents a challenge to the Communist Party, which wants to control the narrative of China, as it always has since taking power in 1949. “It’s very different from anything we have witnessed,” said Maria Repnikova, a communications professor at Georgia State University who researches Chinese media. Never have so many Chines...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized China coronavirus COVID-19 onetime Source Type: news