Chinese citizen reporter goes missing, kin allege forcible quarantine

Chen Qiushi, a 34-year-old Chinese citizen journalist who has been instrumental in sending ground zero alerts on the coronavirus epidemic from Wuhan, has reportedly gone missing since Thursday (February 6) night.

Chen’s family say he was last seen with Wuhan police who they allege had forcibly quarantined him after he was found disseminating videos on the epidemic.

Reports of him missing came to the fore after the news gained traction on Weibo, China’s social media platform identical to Twitter.

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On Friday, a friend of Chen posted a video of his mother saying that her son has disappeared.

“I’m here to beg everyone online, especially friends in Wuhan to help find Qiushi, find out what’s going on with him,” CNN quoted Chen’s mother as saying.

Chen, a lawyer by profession, who according to a CNN report reached Wuhan on January 24, had reported from hospitals, isolation wards and funeral sites, giving social media users a glimpse of the ground realities. He was among the proactive citizen journalists who documented the epidemic and deaths around him. Many Wuhan locals have braved the virus threat and shot videos including untreated people, discontent among quarantined patients and police knocking on doors to enforce censorship, the Bloomberg report said.

Another citizen activist Fang Bin, whose had shot videos on the virus outbreak, was earlier detained by Wuhan authorities for sharing videos of corpses at hospitals, on social media.

Authorities in China, on Wednesday announced that they will conduct “targeted supervision” of social media platforms including Weibo, Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s Douyin. A Bloomberg report said that China’s internet regulator has already suspended social media accounts and restricted internet usage to quieten the outrage over the death of a Chinese doctor who tried to warn people about the virus in January.

According to the Bloomberg report, many WeChat users have also complained of being locked out of their personal accounts over conversations on the virus outbreak.

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While Twitter is blocked in China, many have turned to accessing the platform via virtual private networks.

In a similar way, Chen’s friends had used his Twitter account to post that he was unreachable since 7 pm on Thursday.

The development comes amid a rising social media outrage over the death of Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor who had earlier warned about coronavirus in January.