Chinese Vlogger Detailing Life ? and Death ? Amid Coronavirus Outbreak in Wuhan Disappears, Allegedly 'Forcibly Quarantined'

(BEIJING) — After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell.Chen Qiushi looked haggard and disheveled in his online posts, an almost unrecognizable shadow of the energetic young man who had rolled into Wuhan on a self-assigned mission to tell its inhabitants’ stories, just as authorities locked the city down almost three weeks ago.Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Should Bring Out the Best in HumanityUntil he disappeared last week, the 34-year-old lawyer-turned-video blogger was one of the most visible pioneers in a small but dogged movement that is defying the ruling Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information.Armed with smart phones and social media accounts, these citizen-journalists are telling their stories and those of others from Wuhan and other locked-down virus zones in Hubei province. He said Chen had been healthy and showed no signs of infection.On Sunday, Xu tweeted that despite pleading with authorities for a call with Chen, he and others haven’t been able to get in touch.Police also came knocking last week for Fang Bin, who has been posting videos from Wuhan hospitals, including footage of body bags piled in a minibus, waiting to be carted to a crematorium.Fang, a seller of traditional Chinese clothing, filmed a testy exchange through the metal grill of his door with a group of four or five officers. Repeated calls to the Hubei foreign affairs office rang unanswered, playing instead a pre-recorded message: “Don’t believe rumors, don’t spread rumors.”For Gao Fei, a migrant worker detained after criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping over the virus outbreak, the doctor’s death and Chen’s disappearance are “a wake-up call for the Chinese people.”“The number one reason our government couldn’t control this is because they always conceal the truth and block information from citizens,” he said from his hometown in Hubei.Gao, a welder who had rushed home from southern China right before the lockdown, went to hospitals and drugstores and shared what he saw online.