Chinese filmmaker sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for documentary about COVID tyranny
A 33 year-old Chinese filmmaker highlighted the biggest protests China has seen since Tiananmen Square using only film footage. For this crime of ‘provoking trouble,’ he has been sentenced to over three years in prison.
The Chinese flag hangs
in the cloudy sky outside the prison's barbed wire. Shutterstock
Fri Feb 7, 2025 - 3:29 pm EST
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SHANGHAI (LifeSiteNews) — A Chinese filmmaker has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison for creating a documentary about protests against the Chinese government’s heavy-handed COVID-era restrictions.
A Shanghai court sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin, CNN reported, following his conviction for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge used to target dissenting Chinese political activists, including journalists.
Pinlin’s apparent crime was his creation of “Urumqi Middle Road,” a film that showed a glimpse of the Chinese government’s tyrannical COVID-19 crackdown and featured ensuing “White Paper” protests, named for white pieces of paper held up by street demonstrators in place of signs, to avoid Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship.
The protest movement was sparked by a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi which claimed at least 10 lives, reportedly due to COVID lockdown measures that prevented both the escape of inhabitants and timely rescue efforts. Street vigils cropped up in late November 2022 to remember the deceased, morphing into protests that caught on in several major cities of China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi’an.
The protests became an outlet for the indignation and anguish caused by draconian COVID policies country-wide, and called for an end to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policies, which mandated that citizens be cruelly locked in their own homes for weeks on end. In Shanghai, for example, the government enforcedresidence confinement in some cases by sealing or padlocking doors.
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At the time, China expert Steve Mosher warned that the deadly toll of Shanghai’s ongoing lockdowns would be “much greater” than any potential lives lost due to COVID, and predicted deaths by starvation, strokes and heart attacks.
According to CNN, the White Paper protests, which often directly attacked Xi Jinping, were the largest China had seen since the 1989 student-led Tiananmen Square demonstration. Pinlin’s documentary, still available on YouTube outside of China, includes film footage of White Paper protestors crying, “We want dignity!” “We want the truth!” “We want human rights!”
Masses of protestors also called for Xi Jinping to step down. Some cried for the “removal of traitor Xi Jinping,” and one man can be heard shouting, “Without the Communist Party, there would be a new China!”
The name of the English version of Pinlin’s film is “Not the Foreign Force,” in objection to claims by the CCP that “foreign forces” had fomented protests against the Chinese government.
“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always made the scapegoat,” wrote Pinlin. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets, and censors, the more we must speak up, remind others, and remember. Only by remembering the ugliness can we strive toward the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and future.”
Human rights groups have been calling for the release of Pinlin since his arrest.
Chen “has only ever served the public interest by reporting on historical protests against the regime’s abuses and should never have been arrested. We call on democracies to increase pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that all charges against Chen are dropped,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement in March.
TOPICS
TAGGED AS
- Ccp
- Chen Pinlin
- China
- China COVID lockdowns
- Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
- Communism
- Communists
- Covid
- Covid Lockdowns
- Covid-19
- Freedom
- Protests
- Urumqi Middle Road
