Lawyer missing after reporting on virus

A Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist whose dispatches from Wuhan have offered a chilling glimpse of conditions inside the coronavirus hot zone has been missing since Thursday, friends and relatives say.

Chen Qiushi slipped into the city of 11 million on Jan. 24, just after a citywide lockdown took effect, and spent days interviewing people about the outbreak and filming what he saw.

On Thursday, after several of his reports circulated around the world, Chen stopped responding to calls and messages, setting off an online campaign to track him down. The 34-yearold knew he would be a likely target for law enforcement, so he gave select friends access to his accounts, instructing them to change the passwords if they went more than 12 hours without hearing from him.

According to Chen’s friends, authorities told Chen’s family over the weekend that he had been forcibly quarantined in an undisclosed location. Xu Xiaodong, a well-known mixed martial artist and friend of Chen’s, said in a YouTube live stream that Qingdao public security officers and state security officers told his parents he had been “detained in the name of quarantine.”

Chen’s disappearance fueled an upsurge of anger over the Chinese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, coming just days after the death of Li Wenliang, the “whistleblower doctor” who is considered the first to have sounded the alarm about the new strain of the disease in late December.