Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, the citizen journalists, along with Guo Quan and Xu Zhiyong, the political commentators, were reportedly taken into Chinese police custody back in early February after they told their social media followers what they were personally observing about the coronavirus outbreak, which apparently contradicted what the communist Chinese regime says is happening.
Prior to Chen and Fang going missing, one of Fang's videos, which quickly went viral, showed a funeral home van carrying what appeared to be eight dead bodies. Not long after this video was widely shared, Chinese police broke into Fang's home and took him into custody.
Chen had similarly been posting videos and other content depicting dire conditions in rapidly deteriorating China before he suddenly went missing just a few days before Fang was apprehended by authorities.
"Censorship is clearly counter-productive in the fight against an epidemic and can only aggravate it or even help turn it into a pandemic," warned Cédric Alviani, head of RSF's East Asia bureau, in a recent statement.
"Only complete transparency will enable China to minimize the spread of false rumors and convince the population to follow the health and safety instructions recommended for curbing the epidemic."
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Communist China is now using mandatory quarantine as an excuse to persecute truth-tellers
According to Xu Xiaodong, a friend of Chen's, Chen was forcibly quarantined for 14 days even though he showed no symptoms of the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19). In other words, communist China is now targeting citizens it wants to silence with mandatory quarantine, which just so happens to be a convenient form of censorship amid this ongoing crisis.
As for Guo and Xu, the former was reportedly arrested on Jan. 31 after posting unapproved information about the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) to his social media accounts. He was then held at a detention center in Nanjing, the capital of eastern China's Jiangsu Province.
Xu was also detained and taken away by police in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou following the publishing of an essay he wrote that blamed the communist Chinese regime, and President Xi Jinping specifically, for mishandling the outbreak response.
If there's one thing the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) has accomplished besides giving the communist Chinese regime the excuse to keep hundreds of millions of its citizens under mandatory lockdown, it's the ramping up of its growing censorship efforts, all in the name of fighting outbreak "misinformation."
According to RSF, communist China has "significantly tightened [its] grip on social media and discussion groups where certain journalists and bloggers had dared to post independent reports."
China has even gone so far as to hire internet trolls whose job it is to write propaganda social media posts that praise the government's alleged efforts to contain the virus.
Zhang Xiaoguo, who runs the "news" bureau in China's Propaganda Department, publicly announced back in early February that pro-government coronavirus propaganda is currently his department's top priority.
"In recent weeks, Beijing has also instructed the media to cover the heroism of the responders rather than the suffering of the population or the shortcomings of the measures taken by the government," RSF further contends.
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