TIL Desk/World/Beijing/ A popular Chinese blogger, detained earlier this year for his comments regarding military casualties of Galwan valley clash with India, has been sentenced to eight months in prison. Qiu Ziming, an internet celebrity with more than 2.5 million followers, on Monday received a jail term of eight months for ‘defaming martyrs’, marking the first such case in China since a new amendment was attached to the Criminal Law.
The blogger, who is known online as ‘Labixiaoqiu’, was also ordered to publicly apologise through major domestic portals and the national media within 10 days, ordered a Nanjing court in East China’s Jiangsu Province. The court noted that Qiu had ‘truthfully confessed to his crime’, entered a guilty plea and said in court that he would never commit the crime again. Therefore, he was getting a lighter sentence.
On March 1, Qiu had made an open apology for his comments during a broadcast on China’s state broadcaster CCTV. “I feel extremely ashamed of myself, and I’m very sorry,” said the 38-year-old. The comments came after China admitted for the first time that four of its soldiers had been killed and one seriously wounded in the clash that took place in the Himalayas.
