It'd be a travesty if she was lost. Her videos shined a light in the chaotic darkness of the beginning of this pandemic.<p>I've been concerned lately that a lot of articles critical of China's government have comment sections filled with things like, "America is no better, just look at their prisons" or "Europe has no right to judge, look at how they've handled the migrant crisis", etc. Or, worse, accusing the authors of being xenophobic or racist only because they cast China in a poor light.<p>There seems to be an odd desire right now to ignore any injustices going on in other countries, in favor of critiquing Western nations. Or even downplaying and excusing foreign corruption, to try to highlight how bad Western corruption is. This sort of Victim Olympics does nothing to help the foreign human rights activists, such as Zhang Zhan, who are crying out to the world and begging for our attention.<p>China's corruption is a unique beast that has unique impacts on its victims. Journalists like Zhang Zhan have highlighted this and presented rock-solid evidence. I dearly hope the Western world can quit its culture war squabbles for long enough to listen and offer all possible aid. It's increasingly hard to hear their plight over the sound of the West tearing itself to pieces.
She should be released. But probably she refused to accept the offered term, likely to admit wrong doing according to the Chinese law.<p>The crux of this type of incident is that, one who are aligned herself with western style of morality, would find Chinese laws often to be incompatible with those values. Often such conflict were named "authoratarian" "dictative" etc.<p>As a matter of fact, just like a lot of laws were passed in US without much democratic debate, <i>most</i> laws in China have no democratic debate in the process. There is public opinion collection phase, which does not have a open process. And that were seldom publicized for obvious distrust of the common people's judgement.<p>Then this lady probably did herself the ultimate sacrifice in practicing hungry strike, for proclaiming her own righteousness.<p>Unfortunately, this type of self sacrifice was not useful in changing the people's perception and mentality.<p>I always suggest people like her, western alike, to take a constructive approach to alter the CCP's behavior. I.e., one can always start by educating the normal citizens about the western values, one person after another.<p>Explicit and revolutionary conflicts are exciting, and probably can bring changes really quick. Like CCP did before, transformed the largest nation on earth from an old emperism led system to a socializism totalitarian system, in less than a few decades. But that causes a lot of human suffering, probably the worst in human history.<p>So, as I said, I want Ms. Zhang to keep herself healthy and strong. If she was imprisoned wrongly. Let the system know that you want to fight in a way that yielding is not an option, by actually living well.
FYI: for readers who are unaware, the first covid-19 sequence released from China was unauthorized - he released it through a partner lab in Australia. The research scientist immediately had his lab in China raided and he was fired.<p>So the CCP was not only active in continuing international flights while domestic flights were halted, but the CCP was actively suppressing patient counts and the sequence itself.