NEW DELHI—China has jailed a popular blogger for “smearing martyrs” killed in last year’s bloody clash with Indian soldiers in Galwan.
A court in Nanjing, in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, also ordered Ziming, known by the internet name of “Labixiaoqiu” to publicly apologize through national media to eliminate what the Global Times called “negative impact.”
The Chinese media alleged the blogger spread false information smearing the “four martyrs” in a post on Feb. 10. The report claimed PLA soldiers were killed while dealing with the “Indian military’s illegal trespassing of the Galwan Valley Line of Actual Control.”
Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the high-altitude Galwan valley in Ladakh in a bloody clash on June 15, 2020, that killed 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers.
Dr. Harsh Pant, head of the Strategic Studies Programme at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, told The Epoch Times that the arrest of the Chinese blogger reflects a “defensive attitude on this question of what really happened at the Galwan valley and who is responsible for that and what were the consequences.”
“This is a Chinese attempt to look at information about this episode with suspicion, to shield information, to hide information.”
Pant said the situation is linked with the way the state machinery doesn’t want to expose what happened and its own “culpability in making that happen.”