“Goodness, there are so many dead people,” he said, over footage inside a hospital, which showed patients and relatives wailing.
A week later, he disappeared. His last video, a 12-second clip, uploaded on February 9, 2020, showed a paper scroll with the message: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”
It has now emerged that Fang was tried behind closed doors and has been serving a three-year prison sentence.
He is due to be released at the end of this month, after serving the full sentence, Radio Free Asia reported.
Charges never announced
The exact charges against him were never announced by Chinese authorities, nor was his prison sentence made public.
A number of other citizen journalists who sought to inform the public about the onset of the pandemic also disappeared around the same time as Fang, including Chen Qiushi and Zhang Zhan.
Picking quarrels and provoking trouble
Zhang disappeared in May 2020, and was sentenced to four years in prison at the end of that year for the vague charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. The charge is used frequently in China to jail activists and dissidents.
She remains in prison, and her health has deteriorated, partly because of a partial hunger strike, according to Amnesty International.
Chen has resurfaced only briefly via a video posted online but he has largely kept a low profile. Chinese authorities routinely pressure whistleblowers and activists to stay silent.
In March, China censored news about the death of Jiang Yanyong, the Chinese military doctor who revealed the full extent of the 2003 Sars outbreak and was later placed under house arrest.
