Chinese security officials threatened a man for trying to build a monument in Wuhan dedicated to Chinese coronavirus victims, the Epoch Times reported on Tuesday.
Zhang lost his father to the coronavirus in early February in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged at the end of last year. Zhang’s father died at the height of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cover-up of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak before government authorities informed the public of the contagion’s true risk. Hoping to make sense of his grief, Zhang recently decided to raise funds and build a monument dedicated to coronavirus victims in Wuhan.
“The monument is for mourning our relatives, as well as warning people to remember this history,” Zhang told the newspaper. “It should warn the government to announce outbreak information in a timely manner … If nothing changes, the same disaster will happen again.”
Zhang, a resident of Shenzhen, in southern China, said that once he began making preparations for the project, Shenzhen police began to harass him. He told the Epoch Times that he has been summoned by police on two separate occasions.
The first time, on April 29, police ordered him to stop posting on his social media accounts.
On May 4, Zhang organized a chat group on WeChat, a Chinese messaging platform, for relatives of coronavirus victims. Shortly after, the Shenzen police summoned Zhang for the second time. He says they made him delete the chat group.
“I’m not afraid … [The CCP regime] killed my loved one. How can I keep silent? How can I not speak up and hold the responsible people accountable?” Zhang said.
According to Zhang, some members of his now-deleted WeChat group live in Wuhan. He says he learned that they, too, were being surveilled and intimidated by local police.
“They were told [by Wuhan police] that they would not be monitored if they could shut up for one month,” Zhang told the newspaper.
Zhang said that despite the resistance, he will “not give up” on his plans to build a monument.
In an interview on April 28 with Al Jazeera, Zhang detailed how he lost his father to the Chinese coronavirus and why he now holds the Wuhan government responsible for the death.
On January 17, Zhang took his father to a hospital in Wuhan for a broken leg. His father contracted the coronavirus while in the hospital and died from the disease on February 1. At the time, Wuhan government officials were still downplaying the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in the city, where the coronavirus first emerged late last year.
Zhang now believes the Wuhan government is liable for his father’s death since it covered up and lied about the city’s initial outbreak.
According to Zhang, he never would have taken his father to a hospital in Wuhan had he known the city was suffering from a viral outbreak. Zhang took his father to Wuhan specifically for free medical treatment. His father qualified for free medical aid in Wuhan as a wounded military veteran and former resident of the city. The two traveled almost 700 miles from Shenzhen, in southern China, to Wuhan.
“I didn’t know anything about it [then],” Zhang said of the coronavirus. “If the Wuhan government had been transparent, then perhaps all of this wouldn’t have happened, and thousands of lives would have been saved.”
As late as January 15, Wuhan’s Health Commission issued a statement claiming it still did not have clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus. The commission said that “although the possibility of human-to-human transmission could not be ruled out, the risk of this type of transmission was still low.”
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