A blogger who posted videos about Wuhan hospitals early in the COVID-19 pandemic has been released

BEIJING, 3 May. (DPA/EP) –

Fang Bin, a Chinese blogger arrested in 2020 for posting videos about the situation in Wuhan hospitals at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been released, although Chinese authorities have denied him entry into Beijing.

The American station Radio Free Asia (RFA) has detailed that Bin, 48 years old and classified as a “citizen journalist”, was released on Sunday, after which he moved to Beijing to live with his son. The Beijing authorities reportedly denied him entry.

Bin was arrested after posting videos of body bags and overcrowded hospitals in Wuhan on social media, after which he was sentenced to three years in prison for “causing trouble and fighting” in a case very similar to that of lawyer Zhang Zhan, 39. years, who also reported the virus outbreak and was sentenced to four years in prison on the same charges.

Following his arrest in May 2020, Bin went on a hunger strike that caused him to dramatically lose weight. Since the start of the pandemic at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China has detained several activists who tried to report what was happening at ‘ground zero’.

China has officially reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) only about 120,000 deaths caused by the virus, almost half of them this winter. However, various estimates put the death toll in China at around one million.