.
With many Chinese citizens still in mourning over the the death of a whistleblower doctor, a citizen journalist who has filed critical reporting from Wuhan has gone missing.
As hundreds of thousands of people in China began demanding freedom of speech online Thursday, friends and family discovered that they could no longer contact journalist Chen Qiushi.
Chen arrived in Wuhan on January 24, a day after the city was placed under a state-imposed lockdown. He visited overflowing hospitals, funeral parlors and makeshift isolation wards and uploaded videos of what he saw online, offering the world a glimpse into the often grim reality at the heart of the crisis.
His relatives later found out that he had been put into forced quarantine by the police. By Sunday, Chen's disappearance had started to gain traction on Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, with many pleading for his release.
"Hope the government can treat Chen Qiushi in a fair and just way," one user wrote on Sunday morning. "We can no longer afford a second Li Wenliang!"
Comment