In one video, during the lockdown in Wuhan, China, she filmed a hospital hallway lined with rolling beds, the patients hooked up to blue oxygen tanks. In another, she panned over a community health center, noting that a man said he was charged for a coronavirus test, even though residents believed the tests would be free.
At the time, Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer turned citizen journalist, embodied the Chinese people’s hunger for unfiltered information about the epidemic. Now, she has become a symbol of the government’s efforts to deny its early failings in the crisis and promote a victorious narrative instead.
Zhang abruptly stopped posting in May, after several months of dispatches. Police later revealed that she had been arrested, accused of spreading lies. On Monday, she will go to court, in the first known trial of a chronicler of China’s coronavirus crisis.