My name is Zhang Jing*. I am a student in my mid-20s from mainland China, and I have spent most of this year locking down in the UK, alone and away from family. Since the coronavirus began spreading across China, I’ve spent hours every day scanning the latest news on Chinese social media.
I became used to waking up and falling asleep to countless messages: pleas for help from healthcare workers running out of PPE; posts from families desperately trying to find hospitals that will treat loved ones who have tested positive for the virus; videos of people crying after their family members have died from it; and other tragic posts. Many posts were quickly deleted by censors.
As the months went by, I saw that more and more posts that were not politically sensitive were censored – and I became increasingly frustrated. I was furious after Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who tried to warn fellow doctors about the coronavirus, died from the virus in February and news of his death was heavily censored.
