About a month after her release from the Shanghai Women’s Prison in May 2024, citizen journalist and former lawyer Zhang Zhan (張展) made her first post on X in four years. She had been detained since 2020 for documenting the unfolding Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan.
Accessing international platforms like X and YouTube with a virtual private network, Zhang published videos showing overcrowded hospitals and the whir of the crematorium, all while the Chinese government under-reported cases and suppressed early warnings of the pandemic.
Zhang’s “case is significant precisely because it is so emblematic of the widespread and systematic nature of arbitrary, and often-secret, detention in China,” Michael Caster, head of the Global China Programme at ARTICLE 19, a British human rights organization, said in an email.
Reporters Without Borders estimates the current number of media workers detained in China and Hong Kong to be 123. That makes China “the world’s largest prison for journalists.” The system seeks to suppress their will to report the facts, and dissuade others from doing the same. But people can be hard to break.
Zhang resisted her imprisonment through hunger strikes, and was met with force-feeding, medical neglect and multiple hospitalizations. Her treatment in detention points “to a system that uses bodily harm and exhaustion as instruments of control,” the Coalition for Women in Journalism wrote in an email. “Her survival through years of incarceration under extreme conditions is not evidence of justice. It is evidence of endurance in the face of state cruelty.”
After four years of imprisonment, Zhang opened her first post on X with “Hi,” deliberately avoiding the Chinese greeting 你好 (“hello,” literally “you’re well”). Switching to Chinese, Zhang addressed her message “to everyone struggling under authoritarian rule,” explaining that “I don’t want to say ‘hello,’ because under oppression, no one is doing well.”
“I hope you can leave China soon,” someone commented.
But leaving was not Zhang’s plan. Instead, she dug back in. This time Zhang documented the continued surveillance, censorship and harassment she experienced from the police. Zhang was arrested again a few months later and handed another four-year sentence a year after that, in September 2025. She was charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (尋釁滋事罪), a catch-all offense that’s commonly used to convict activists. It’s the same charge she received in 2020. The ruling cites her posts on X, published during the brief window of limited relative freedom she enjoyed between June and August of 2024, as evidence.
Zhang was located in the Shanghai Women’s Prison last November, after being cut off from the outside world for over a year, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Other incarcerated media workers in China have not been located. One of these people is Gui Minhai (桂民海), a Hong Kong publisher and writer with Swedish nationality who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2020 for “illegally providing intelligence to foreign entities.” Gui was a former shareholder of Causeway Bay Books, an independent bookstore in Hong Kong. In 2015, five people connected to the bookstore, including Gui, were arrested and detained in China. It is not clear where Gui is located or whether he is still alive.
Lam Wing-kee (林榮基), the founder of Causeway Bay Books and who was among the five people taken into custody in 2015, recounted his experience. After being captured at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border, Lam was first detained in Ningbo, about 1,300 kilometers away from his home.
“They constantly threatened me, saying they could send me somewhere remote where nobody would know, that they could kill me,” Lam said in an interview at Causeway Bay Books’ new location in Taipei. “When I asked what my charges were, they said, ‘If we say you’re guilty, you’re guilty.’”
Three months into his imprisonment, Lam learned he was being held for selling banned books to the mainland. He wasn’t able to contact a lawyer. The one phone call he was allowed to his family was scripted and monitored by someone sent in from Guangzhou who could speak Cantonese. Lam was held for six additional months after that phone call.
Lam initially found refuge when he was released on bail by mainland authorities to Hong Kong in June 2016. Lam gave a press conference upon his return describing his experience in detention, saying that his case “shows that Hongkongers should be concerned for their security.” The South China Morning Post called him “tired but defiant.” Under the one country, two systems framework, Hong Kong officials refused to hand him back over to the Chinese authorities. Lam moved to Taiwan in 2019, fearing the imminent collapse of that system. He was right.
The totemic case of diminishing press freedoms in Hong Kong is Jimmy Lai (黎智英), the 78-year old founder of now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper. Lai, who has been held in prison for the last five years while his legal cases played out in court, received a 20-year sentence on Monday for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious materials. This is the harshest sentence yet under national security legislation that Beijing inserted into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution in 2020.
The Chinese government’s tightening stranglehold over independent journalism has not yet suffocated the space entirely. Liu Hu (劉虎) and Wu Yingjiao (巫英蛟) were arrested earlier this month for publishing a report on WeChat that exposed the corruption of a senior official in Pujian County in Sichuan, who had been forcibly seizing property from businessmen. They are being investigated for “making false accusations” and “illegal business operations.”
“The problem that we face right now is that it’s difficult to explain the amount of pressure [on media workers] because there’s no constant arrests as before because there’s no one else to be arrested,” Aleksandra Bielakowska, an advocacy manager at Reporters Without Borders, said. “For new cases to happen, like Liu Hu, is very, very rare.”
Don’t forget that victories are the result of peoples’ tireless efforts, Zhang said in a post on X in August 2024, the month she disappeared again. “After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch in this world.”
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