Chinese freelance documentary filmmaker Chen Pinlin is serving a prison sentence of three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Shanghai police arrested Chen, who published work under the pseudonym Plato, on November 28, 2023.
In November 2023, Chen published the documentary “Not the Foreign Force,” in which he compiled footage of the anti-COVID-restriction “White Paper Protests.” The protests were part of a movement that began in November 2022 in response to the government’s stringent lockdown measures, after a deadly apartment fire in the northwest region of Xinjiang killed at least 10 people.
The documentary was published on YouTube and the social platform X; Chen’s accounts have since been removed.
On November 28, Shanghai police arrested Chen on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
On January 5, 2024, Chen was formally arrested on the same charge by Shanghai city’s Baoshan District police, and indicted on April 3 by the Baoshan District Procuratorate, or public prosecutor.
In August, a court in Shanghai held a closed-door pre-trial meeting, which Chen’s lawyers Li Guobei and Yuan Mao said were illegal. The lawyers also accused the court of denying them access to case documents. In the indictment, prosecutors accused Chen of “knowingly spreading fabricated false information on the internet, causing serious disruption of public order; reposting and quoting remarks that insult national leaders, damaging the national image and seriously endangering national interests.”
Yuan, Chen’s lawyer, in a September 26 post on Chinese blogsite Weibo said that his client told him the cells at the detention center were overcrowded and he had to sleep sideways, and he was only allowed to go outside once a month.
On January 6, 2025, Chen was tried in a Shanghai court. The court sentenced him that day to three and a half years in prison.
The Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau did not to CPJ’s emailed request for comment sent in August 2025.