Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in jail on Monday for her reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, which is widely believed to be the origin of the coronavirus.

The 37-year-old was found guilty by the Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Court of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which is a loosely defined crime frequently used by Chinese authorities to clamp down on dissenting voices. The offense carries a maximum punishment of five-year imprisonment.

One of her attorneys Zhang Keke told Apple Daily after the sentencing that she was in poor condition and needed to use a wheelchair to appear in court.Zhang was given a “heavier” sentence than expected, her lawyers said, and that her mother was shocked and burst into tears after hearing the sentence.

Another attorney representing Zhang, Ren Quanniu, said Zhang was “extremely shocked” when the judge lay down the sentence. He said when he met with Zhang last week, she said if she was handed a heavy sentence, she would go on a hunger strike again as a protest against the current social and political environment in China.

She was prepared to die in prison, Ren said.

Maintaining her innocence, Zhang had staged a hunger strike since she was arrested on May 14 and told her lawyers that she had been force-fed with a tube.

Zhang was among the few Chinese citizen journalists who covered the growing COVID-19 situation inside Wuhan. She was arrested near Wuhan Railway Station on May 14, and was immediately transported to a detention center in Pudong district in Shanghai.

Zhang was accused of repeatedly publishing a large quantity of false information in text and short videos on WeChat, Twitter and YouTube after arriving in Wuhan, and “maliciously” hyped the outbreak to foreign media.

Sources familiar with the matter said authorities were never able to prove that Zhang’s actions in Wuhan had constituted a crime.

Zhang was previously detained on suspicion of the same offense for staging a protest in Shanghai in support of the anti-government protests that erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, where she held an umbrella that read, “End socialism, the Communist Party will step down.”

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