Virus storytellers challenge China's official narrative

Chinese citizen journalist Chen Qiushi in front of a convention centre-turned makeshift hospital in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. — Chen Qiushi via AP

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 unrecognisable 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.