Citizen journalist Fang Bin, who was jailed after filming from hospitals and funeral homes in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, is now homeless after being evicted from an apartment he rented just last month.
Fang, who was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at a secret trial, was released last year and ordered back to Wuhan when he traveled to Beijing.
Back in Wuhan, Fang stayed for a while in Qiaokou district, where he was frequently questioned by local police as part of China's " stability maintenance" system that targets dissidents and activists before they have a chance to do anything, prompting him to leave the area.
Before his detention on Feb. 1, 2020, Fang was among a number of high-profile bloggers who tried to report on the emerging and little-understood viral outbreak from Wuhan. He described the pandemic as a "man-made" disaster, calling on people to resist government "tyranny."
He sent reports from Wuhan No. 5 Hospital and a funeral home in Wuchang, part of the three-city conurbation that makes up Wuhan, where he watched staff move out eight dead bodies in the space of five minutes, suggesting the death toll was far higher than the officially reported figure.
Last month, Fang found an apartment in Huangpi district, further out of town, and signed a one-year lease with a private landlord surnamed Ren on April 15, paying a year's rent and service charges up front.
Three days later, local officials found out that he had moved into the area, and put pressure on the landlord to terminate his lease, he told RFA Mandarin in an interview on Wednesday.
The landlord told him he was being evicted, saying he couldn't take the kind of pressure he was being put under.
"When [the authorities] found out that I'd moved to Huangpi from Qiaokou, they were against me living in Huangpi," Fang said. "They put pressure on the landlord to evict me."
"They cut off my power and water supply ... They want me to leave," he said. "I paid the rent and the service charge."
Fang said unidentified people had used "every tactic they could think of" to put pressure on the landlord, who didn't dare to say where the pressure was coming from.
"He said, 'I can't stand this any more — I'll give you your money back,'" Fang said.
A 'stability maintenance' target
Repeated calls to the neighborhood committee at Shekoujie Sub-district Office rang unanswered during office hours on Wednesday.
Fang believes local officials there didn't want him living in the district because he's a "stability maintenance" target, whom they fear could cause trouble for them.
Fang left on April 27, then regained entry to the apartment the following day, only to have the water and power cut off on April 29, he said. Then someone tampered with the door lock, shutting Fang out of the apartment entirely.
"They think that my living here would be dangerous or troublesome for them, due to stability maintenance and so on," he said. "They think I'll cause them trouble, be another thing they are responsible for."
Fang went incommunicado after a Feb. 1, 2020, livestream from Wuhan healthcare facilities, and made a couple more videos in the days that followed about his interrogation by police, before falling silent for three years, with no news of his fate.
He was sentenced in secret by the Jiang'an District People's Court, which didn't share any legal documents with his family, then served his sentence in the Xiaojunshan former juvenile correction facility, activists said at the time.
Fang's disappearance came a few days after the detention of another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, who had been interviewing people involved with the new mega hospitals being built at great speed in Wuhan.
Fellow citizen journalist Kcriss Li continued reporting from the scene for a few more weeks after that, until his dramatic, live-streamed chase by police on Feb. 26.
Lawyer-turned-reporter Zhang Zhan was detained and taken back to Shanghai, where there are ongoing concerns about her health in prison following months of on-off hunger strikes and forced feeding.
The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China called for Fang's release in its annual report in November 2022, along with all those detained for reporting on the pandemic in China.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie . Edited by Roseanne Gerin.