China had an “appalling year” for human rights in 2020, a leading advocacy group said on Wednesday, with a clampdown on dissent in Hong Kong, repression of Muslim Uyghurs, and the silencing of people reporting on the coronavirus outbreak. A Chinese court last month handed down a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus before it spread across the globe, while others who did the same have disappeared. “To crack down on whistleblowers and citizen-journalists at this particular moment … helps highlight to the rest of the world what the consequences of violations inside China can be,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said after the release of the group’s World Report 2021. HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth told Reuters Television in Geneva that China remained the biggest threat to global human rights and that Chinese leader Xi Jinping …