Chinese freelance journalist Zhang Zhan is being detained in Shanghai on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” She was arrested in August 2024, just three months after completing a four-year prison sentence on the same charges.
Zhang was first arrested on May 14, 2020, for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Beginning in early February 2020, Zhang covered the pandemic on Twitter, later renamed X, and YouTube from Wuhan, the center of the COVID-19 outbreak.
She was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2020 and released in May 2024.
According to U.S.-Congress funded Voice of America, Zhang remained under close surveillance following her release. She launched a new YouTube channel, where she posted interviews with petitioners and activists, and documented social and livelihood issues.
In August 2024, she was arrested by Shanghai police while traveling to the northwestern province of Gansu to report on the case of a young activist who had also been arrested. Reports differ on the timing of Zhang’s second arrest: Some say she was taken into custody on August 25, while others indicate that police detention began on August 28.
Zhang, who is being held in Shanghai, faces up to five more years in prison if convicted. As of July 2025, a court had yet to set a date to hear her case.
During her first imprisonment from 2020 to 2024, reports stated that Zhang went on intermittent hunger strikes to protest her detention, and at one point was put on a feeding drip; she was also hospitalized in 2021, according to news reports. In January 2025, detention center authorities subjected her to forced nasogastric feeding after she began another hunger strike to protest her second arrest.
In May 2025, CPJ and 58 other organizations issued a joint statement demanding Zhang’s immediate release and condemning the Chinese government for her continued arbitrary detention.
The Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau did not respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment sent in August 2025.