Fang Bin

Fang Bin, a businessman from mainland China. During the COVID-19 epidemic, he used YouTube and WeChat as channels to distribute images of Wuhan city, and was arrested multiple times from February 1 to 9, 2020. On April 1, 2020, Jim Banks, a Republican congressman from Indiana, submitted a request to the U.S. State Department to investigate the disappearance of three Chinese journalists, including Li Zehua, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin. Three years after Fang Bin's arrest, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) issued a statement on February 9, 2023, calling on "the Chinese Communist Party to immediately release citizen journalist Fang Bin and all those detained for reporting on the COVID-19 epidemic in China." Fang Bin is a dissident registered in the CECC's "political prisoner database." The CECC pointed out that Fang Bin's whereabouts and the legal basis for his detention by the authorities are still unknown. According to reports, Fang Bin will be released from prison on April 30, 2023. Fang Bin was secretly sentenced to more than three years in prison by the Wuhan Jiang'an District Court. During this period, his family did not receive any legal documents or verdicts, and they were not informed of his charges.