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Letters

My thanks to Jerome Cohen for his analysis and tribute to Chinese former lawyer Zhang Zhan for her courageous reporting on the Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan (“Why Covid-19 citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s fate deserves greater scrutiny”, January 3).
Highly centralised governments should value truthful reporting by local reporters. Often, local officials will conceal problems from the central authorities. It should not be necessary for the central authorities to pretend that everything is perfect.
Reporters, whether independent or working for news media, should only be prosecuted if they publish false information or reveal military or other high-level state secrets. Pointing out imperfections in local or central governments should not warrant prosecution.
Bruce Couchman, Ottawa, Canada


Trump-Xi diplomacy put to test thanks to tit-for-tat Covid lawsuits

Wuhan mayor best known for defending city’s slow response to Covid faces corruption probe

US vaccine sceptics are now in charge. That’s bad news for the world

Covid cases reaching a peak in China and will start falling next month: leading expert

Coronavirus China

Why China should value, not silence, those like Zhang Zhan

Zhang Zhan, 37, a former Shanghai lawyer and citizen journalist who covered the early days of Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak, has been jailed for four years over “picking quarrels and provoking troubles”. Photo: AFP/YouTube

Australia is in no position to criticise China on human rights abuses

Illustration: Craig Stephens

FILE PHOTO: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison arrives at Haneda airport in Tokyo, Japan, November 17, 2020. REUTERS/Issei Kato/File Photo/File Photo

epa07192101 Protesters hold up signs during a rally demanding the resettlement of kids held in the detention center on Nauru Island, outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, 27 November 2018. Refugees who wish to resettle and people seeking asylum in Australia are moved to offshore detention facilities on Manus Island and Nauru Island, or returned to their locale of departure before they are able to make an asylum claim. EPA-EFE/LUKAS COCH AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND OUT

Indigenous Australian performers hold a smoking ceremony to open NAIDOC Week, a national program that celebrates the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee in Sydney on July 6, 2015, which grew from the first political groups seeking rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians in the 1920s. Australia's political rivals met Aboriginal leaders in Sydney on July 6 to work towards "correcting" the constitution by recognising the nation's first indigenous inhabitants with Prime Minister Tony Abbott previously declaring he would "sweat blood" to update the document which was written more than a century ago and fails to mention Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. AFP PHOTO / Peter PARKS (Photo by PETER PARKS / AFP)

The US is no beacon of freedom: remember Snowden?

Copies of the book “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden are displayed on the shelves at the Harvard Book Store in Massachusetts in September 2019. Snowden has been living in exile in Russia after leaking American intelligence secrets in 2013, and is wanted in the US on espionage charges. Photo: EPA-EFE

China ‘in close communication’ with WHO on Covid-19 origins mission

A child gets tested in Dalian, northeast China, in December. A WHO team has not yet been granted entry to the country to investigate the origins of Covid-19. Photo: AFP

Marion Koopmans, head of the Erasmus Medical CentreÕs Department of Viroscience. Photo: EOSC secretariat

Coronavirus: US diplomats cautiously praised China’s transparency in early days

A photo taken on January 11, 2020, shows members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team searching the closed Huanan Seafood Market following the outbreak of the coronavirus. Photo: AFP

A security guard stands outside the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market where the coronavirus was detected in Wuhan on January 24, 2020 - The death toll in China's viral outbreak has risen to 25, with the number of confirmed cases also leaping to 830, the national health commission said. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP)

Wuhan doctor hailed for first reporting coronavirus defends China’s handling of outbreak saying there was no cover-up

Doctors in Wuhan raised the alarm late last year. Photo: EPA-EFE

Opinion


Highly centralised governments should value truthful reporting by local reporters



.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} Highly centralised governments should value truthful reporting by local reporters

Highly centralised governments should value truthful reporting by local reporters