A Chinese citizen-journalist who made videos of Wuhan during the COVID-19 outbreak has been exiled to the US to avoid persecution by the Chinese authorities. That’s according to the nonprofit organization Committee to Protect Journalists, who published an interview with the citizen-journalist Li Zehua (李澤華) on Thursday. Li had previously worked as a reporter for the Chinese state-owned CCTV.
Li said he rushed to Wuhan when he began hearing stories about the virus in early 2020. He began interviewing locals who said they had not been told the truth about the virus. He was even able to enter the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been accused of being the source of the COVID-19 outbreak. His videos posted on social media under the name Kcriss Li attracted the attention of Chinese authorities.
In February of 2020, Li live streamed Chinese security officers knocking on his door, and he was subsequently detained and forced to “quarantine” for 35 days.
Eventually, he was able to obtain a visa and escaped to the United States. Li said that if Chinese journalists like him had been allowed to report freely, the outbreak might not have been as severe.
The interview comes out just weeks after reporting on a classified US Department of Energy report, which concluded with low confidence that a leak from the Wuhan lab was the most likely source of the COVID-19 outbreak. A Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the outbreak also had their first hearing on the source of COVID-19 on Wednesday.