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A Chinese documentary filmmaker has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for producing a documentary about China’s crackdown on nationwide protests against the 2023 Covid lockdown, according to Chinese human rights news sites. ‘man.
Chen Pinlin, known by his stage name “Plato”, was first arrested on November 29, 2023 and officially arrested on January 5, 2024 by Shanghai police for broadcasting his documentary. Urumqi Middle Road on the occasion of the first anniversary of the White Paper Movement.
The White Paper Movement or White Paper Revolution is a series of protests that erupted in China in late 2022 during which thousands of demonstrators displayed blank sheets of paper – a symbol of censorship – to express their frustration with the strict policy “zero-Covid” of the country. .
The protests were sparked by outrage over a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, in November 2022. The incident reportedly led to deaths that many blamed on Covid containment measures that hampered efforts escape and rescue.
Pinlin was detained at Shanghai’s Baoshan Detention Center for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a charge criticized as vague and elastic and used by authorities to suppress dissent and maintain social control.
Chinese human rights news site Weiquanwang reported that he was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in prison.
“Chen Pinlin, arrested for more than a year, was treated extremely inhumanely in the detention center,” he said Tuesday.
The conviction was first reported by CNN, which cited sources familiar with the matter. His conviction was pronounced after a three-hour trial behind closed doors.
Another human rights news site, Minsheng Guancha, reported that the first trial in the case took place on Monday in Shanghai’s Baoshan District Court.
Pinlin released the documentary, titled Not foreign force in English on YouTube and
The footage showed people chanting slogans demanding President Xi Jinping’s resignation.
Releasing the documentary, he said: “I hope to explore why whenever internal conflicts break out in China, foreign forces are always scapegoated.” The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets and censors, the more we must speak out, remind others and remember.”
“Only by remembering the ugliness can we tend toward the light. I also hope that one day China will embrace its own light and its own future. »
The protests were a brief burst of defiance, the most direct challenge to Communist Party authority in decades.
Videos of the protest spread across the Internet and gained momentum among those unhappy with state control. In the following days, thousands of people gathered in Shanghai and more than a dozen other cities across China, waving sheets of paper, shouting slogans and jostling with officers.
The protests were the result of frustration and anger over Mr. Xi’s tough new approach to governance, which included strict, large-scale lockdowns, mass testing, quarantine measures and heavy restrictions then that the virus was spreading globally. The lockdown itself has been blamed for the number of deaths and accidents in the country.
In 2021, a bus carrying people to a quarantine center in Guizhou crashed, killing 27 people in a province where Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic were just two.
A month later, thousands of workers at an Apple iPhone factory in Zhengzhou clashed with riot police and tore down Covid barricades. New outbreaks of violence followed reports of more deaths due to the lockdown, including a three-year-old child and a baby.
And anger reached a fever pitch after 10 Urumqi residents died in a fire in a building that had been closed for 100 days. Authorities appeared to blame residents for not doing enough to bring the fire under control.