SURVIVING CHINA, IMPRISONMENT AND INJUSTICE – CHENG LEI

Journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three gruelling years in a Beijing prison after being wrongly accused of espionage. In August 2020, Cheng Lei was the precise and polished anchor of China’s government-run, English-language Global Business TV show, familiar to millions of viewers. Arriving for work one morning, Lei was met by officers from the notorious Ministry of State Security. Detained, isolated and interrogated, she was cut off from all contact with her family and friends. It would be ten months before Lei saw her lawyer, a year and a half before a 90-minute show trial, more than two years before she would briefly hear the voices of her children, and three years and two months before she saw the entirety of the sky. After launching her book A Memoir of Freedom, Cheng Lei addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 19 August 2025. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of her address.

SURVIVING CHINA, IMPRISONMENT AND INJUSTICE

CHENG LEI

Thank you to everyone for coming and to The Sydney Institute.

My life changing journey to Australia started in Sydney. In 1984, my dad was one of the first Chinese visiting scholars to come here. He learned English in Sydney for six months. Back then, in China, it was a huge thing to go overseas. My father was a researcher in metallurgical engineering, and he lived in Redfern in a $25 a week flat. He bought pet mince to save money. He walked instead of taking the $6 a week bus so he could save money and buy a big box of chocolates to send to me, his nine-year-old daughter back in China.

When I heard that we would be going to Australia, I was super excited, even though I had no idea what to expect. The only thing Chinese people knew about foreigners was that they ate a lot of chicken. So, I told my friends at school that I would soon be chomping drumsticks. At the time, we ate chicken, maybe once or twice a year such as Chinese New Year or when there were important guests for the family. For that, you would just kill a family hen.

We came to Australia in September 1985. That was when I began to change to being an Australian. First it meant mastering the language. And thanks to the fact that I went to a school where there were only three other Asians, one Cambodian and two Vietnamese Chinese, one of whom spoke a bit of Mandarin. Back then, if you saw somebody with dark hair, you felt you wanted to go and talk to them. There were only one or two Asian grocers to shop in and you had to learn everything anew.

Learning English made me a real chatterbox, as opposed to being tongue tied and very shy at the beginning. When I could not speak the local language, whenever I went to the tuck shop and the lady said, “What flavour chips do you want?”, I would be panicky because I didn’t know what the flavours meant. I would just have to nod at something. Invariably, I always got the salted vinegar chips. So that was a huge motivation to learn English, not just to make friends, but to try all the different flavours of chips.

When I was incarcerated in China, the thing I missed most, apart from my favourite foods, was feeling like myself, feeling human. That experience is dehumanising. I was just a number. None of us were allowed to tell each other our names. All the things that we humans are good at, like being kind, empathetic, sharing, having free thoughts, being gossipy were all not allowed there. The cardinal rule is to feel punished.

The number one commandment in detention is about not vilifying the party or the party leaders. Thought control is a priority. The first phase of incarceration, is Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location or RSDL. I could never figure out why it was called a “residence”. What type of residence would have you sitting for 13 hours a day in a room with two people glued to you at all times? They switched every four hours in shifts, but you were always there and you weren’t allowed to move unless you got permission. You weren’t allowed to talk and the curtains were always closed. You had nothing of your own and you could do nothing. You do this for six months. And it is worse for the Chinese citizens who would be beaten up or tortured, or threatened with many things. Their families would be spoken to, harassed, threatened. And how is that residential?

So, having gone through that, I had already hit the worst point, the lowest point, the point where I wanted to die. Of course, they’re so safety conscious that you have nothing with which to kill yourself. The utensil you use to eat food was very soft, like a baby food spoon; anything that you needed to use was brought in by the guards every shift. When you went to the toilet, one shuffled backwards and another one followed you. So, you couldn’t even take them by surprise.

I sometimes joke very darkly that only China can afford to do this because it’s so labour intensive to have these 24/7 guards who suffer, just as I did, because they have to watch me do everything from sleeping to going to the toilet to just sitting there for hours and hours. And the purpose of that is to make you feel isolated, desperate and eager to do anything to change the circumstances.

It wasn’t until ten months later that I could see my lawyer. Recently, when I gave a talk to a bunch of lawyers, they could not believe that this was what happened. The prosecutor came to visit me much earlier. I had already signed many versions of a confession, which they make you write. There were videotaped confessions.

You have nothing. You cannot contact anyone. You cannot talk about the case at all. The only interaction with the outside world, the monthly 30-minute embassy visits, were by video link with everyone wearing masks. So, you couldn’t even get the comfort of seeing a friendly face. When finally, the dreaded RSDL form of torture ended, and I entered what was called detention, it felt like all my Christmases had come at once because I had cellmates. Unless you have been through solitary, unless you have been your own torturer for that long, 180 days, you cannot imagine how welcome is the sight of another face belonging to someone who is in the same position. I always said I would much rather eat slop with cell mates than be in solitary with the best physical conditions because you cannot overestimate the power of human companionship.

Of course, being locked up with others also has its downsides. It is close proximity living, sharing everything, with no respite and everyone is stressed. You run out of things to talk about. You run out of patience and empathy, because everyone is in their own little hell. So, for those one thousand odd days, how do you rise above small minds bickering over small things – like who dropped a bit of water on my laundry. And people even having fights, just escalating. It’s like when you go to the RSPCA and you see dogs barking for no reason, because they are stressed out. And multiply that by a thousand in this situation.

I kept my sanity with exercise. A lot of mental and physical discipline from the moment I woke up, which was always with Für Elise by Beethoven. As a result, that piece of music has been ruined for me. I would start my ever growing list of exercises – ab crunches, squats, yoga positions. Only then can you beat the mental demons. When I was able to get books, I would almost fly away, thanks to the power of words. Even books that we wouldn’t ordinarily find the patience to read outside were so resonant in the cell. Books about science, where you realise that we are really nothing, that even our human history is nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Philosophy, poetry. I had a favourite poem called “The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop”, written by an Australian poet. I did write to her after my release to thank the poet, because it helped me just hold those images of beautiful, fresh produce in my head.

I would say to myself as I spooned another very salty and terribly unpalatable, spoon of onion stew into my mouth, that I’m one meal closer to real food, to eating with family, to eating for pleasure. When you have no images, imagery can help. I had music. Technically, we couldn’t sing or do anything that was joyful in detention. But we avoided the five surveillance cameras in the cell and the patrolling of guards and officers by always singing in a low voice and keeping a look out for anyone coming or footsteps in the corridor. Eventually, I had taught my cellmates 60 songs ranging from Paul Simon, to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”. We did get into trouble for attempting some air guitar riffs on a container lid, and I even plucked out notes by putting a hair elastic on my food container lid.

It is at this point that you realise when you have nothing, you actually can dig very deep. Out of desperation, out of our DNA for resourcefulness, you can create fun and entertainment. You see the looks of joy on your cellmates faces, who all ordinarily have resting bitch faces at all times, and the light is terrible, so none of us look very happy. But when our eyes do light up from learning the notes of an Elton John song or being able to say something sarcastically funny about the food or about nicknames we’ve given the officers, it is a spark. That is enough to tide you over the darkness.

When you are deprived of everything, you can become like the desert flower that absorbs moisture from the air. We have so much at our fingertips, so much beauty and enjoyment and connection that we sometimes lament any little misfortune. But when you have zero, when you do come upon a new thought, when you make a joke and you harmonise in music, then it’s very powerful. It’s something that will live with you. And the kindnesses of ordinary Australians touched our cell as well. When I went to the embassy visits, I always felt I was the richest in the cell, being the foreigner and having more visits than my Canadian-Chinese cellmate, for example. I would bring back any tidbit, be it an open letter signed by other journalists and public figures, or a greeting from an old friend.

My assumption, when this happened to me, was that I would lose everything. My reputation was in the gutter. Nobody would be my friend anymore. I would never find a job again, and the entire world would think I’m a spy, which I’m not. But it wasn’t so, and that helped. Be it the Perth nun who prayed for me in their chapel and wrote to me about it, or friends who brought books via the embassy, or my kids who would tell me their latest mishaps at school. Like my daughter saying in a letter that she was at an athletics day, and you know, she was at the starting blocks, and somebody said, “Oh, I’m terrible at running”, and then she was duped. Anything that reminded me of the living world, because it did feel like we were buried alive. So, when friends felt guilty about telling me how much fun they were having, I said, “No, keep telling me what you’re doing”, because that is the why. That is my reason for sticking it out another day, for living.” When you have a why, you can find the how. So, I used yoga. I made crafts out of scraps of packaging. It’s amazing that the Ministry of State Security is so insecure that it prohibits almost everything. There are monthly raids where you are strip searched. Even a little plastic bag could get you into trouble. Multiple attempts by my family and friends to send me something as innocuous as a t-shirt would be disallowed.

Everything in detention is very arbitrary. When they heard about my public love letter to Australia that garnered so much media attention and public support, they punished me by stopping letters and books. They lied to me saying they had updated their review system and this was why I was not getting letters. But the Australian Embassy checked with other embassies, who also had prisoners there, and found that was not so. So, it’s all about how they see your level of co-operation.

Sometimes I fear that, even in free Australia, we can be imprisoned invisibly because of our trade dependence. It is very difficult to walk that balance between engaging, and we have all benefited and profited from our trade with China. I also would like to see more China literacy and more multi-faceted coverage of China, which partly as a result of my imprisonment has gone diminished. Organisations are afraid of sending more correspondents into China. And ordinary Chinese are now so much more indoctrinated by the CCP line that foreigners are trying to erode China’s stability. They would either not dare to speak to foreign journalists or be afraid to speak candidly. That is my worry now. But when it counted, the Australian government helped me. Right after Labor won the election in the middle of 2022 in November, there was the meeting between our Prime Minister Albanese and the Chinese president. Three weeks after that, I received my first and only phone call with my mum and the kids. The Australian Embassy had been lobbying for that for over two years, to no avail.

There is this carrot and stick approach and that’s partly why we all sort of have this PTSD. If this is what happens when we upset China, then, how do we avoid it? And can we sometimes go too far in the direction of caution? That is, again, something that I worry about. Even after my release, I feel sometimes I’m shadow-cancelled by organisations that rely on China revenues. The consulate and embassy still try to, sometimes behind the scenes, to get talks like this cancelled. So, a big thank you to Sydney Institute for allowing me to speak freely here. For three years and two months, I couldn’t. I had no voice, even at the embassy visits which were every month and they were only 30 minutes. I could not utter a word about my case, or I would lose all visiting privileges. The conversation was strictly monitored. I was flanked by officers and videographed such that we did not dare speak about anything that might be sensitive.

So, it is a difficult beast I find dealing with China. Considering that we have more than one million immigrants and descendants of immigrants of Chinese heritage, and some of their roots go back deep. There’s a lot of fear among the businesses that depend on China, among academics that need to go back to China. And, of course, people with family in China. A lot of my old Melbourne friends are too scared to be friends with me. Sometimes, when there is a communal dinner, and when we take a group photo, a few of them would leave the picture. In fact, I heard today that there were Chinese students at the University of New South Wales who didn’t like the fact that I was doing these talks. I was called a monster and a clown.

My whole experience of Australia after coming here as a child in 1985 was China and Australia starting to get to know each other. There were people to people exchanges. In the 1990s and especially in the early noughties, our trade grew, even skyrocketed. There was so much exchange, and I was reporting on all of that for the Chinese TV station at first, and then at CNBC, which is a US business network. That was, I guess, when China was keen to internationalise and engage and free up many, many things.

In the past decade, however, things have gone backwards. Today, when we talk about internationalisation in China, it’s almost a dirty word. And they now have the economic power to coerce so many countries, especially in the global south. They don’t really care about the developed world’s cause for more transparency and correcting human rights abuses. How I am seen is quite indicative of where we are in the world.

In the Chinese language world, I am vilified. There are many, many untruths about me being spread – things like my parents are uneducated, that they forced me to sell out China to the Americans and the Australians, and even specifically that I leaked something on air in May 2020. I read the dirty, vitriolic comments about me in order to desensitise myself. Assertions that I should be skinned alive, flayed, that I don’t deserve to be a mother, says a lot about the culture of hate. Contrast that to how I’ve been treated in Australia, which is believed and supported.

When I was first released, people recognised me on the street. They would give me a hug or tell me their stories of families being persecuted from similarly authoritarian regimes. We sometimes forget that we are such a kind people. That was what my dad said in our early years of trying to assimilate into the Australian way of life. As he said, because we had been treated kindly, we could spare it for others, including strangers. I hope that doesn’t change. After all, that’s what got me through a lot of the dark years.

I am so thankful that not only do I have my physical freedom, I’ve been able to reclaim my voice and to tell people more about what China wants to be hidden. For a country of such might that it claims to have, it certainly tries to hide a lot, and much of its modern history is either erased or denied or changed. Not only is our China literacy declining, we also have many people who only see the glossy facade and miss out on the cost of the glossy facade. The people left behind, the people exploited and abused, and all the voices of dissent that China tries to quash.

Yes, I suffered. Yes, it was horrible for me, personally and for my family. But it is nothing compared to what Chinese citizens go through, including many human rights lawyers and activists who are still jailed and harassed and threatened today. And all these invisible jails that people have within them to not say, to not even think certain things, because of that culture of secrecy and punishment. I’m super grateful to all of you for listening to my story.

In case you’re wondering what it is that I had done to warrant such treatment, I can point to a few things. I found out at my show trial, my 90-minute show trial which took place 19 months after my arrest, that they had started surveillance on me in April before I was arrested in August. That was a few days after our foreign minister, at the time, Marise Payne, called for an independent investigation into the source of COVID which incensed China to the extent of slapping on extreme trade sanctions and surveillance on Aussies in China. The fact that we had identified and ousted some Xinhua reporters as Chinese spies. The fact that I had made social media posts critical about China’s handling of the pandemic. There could be more reasons because anything to do with state security in China is a state secret.

What I’ve been able to glean from speaking to my cellmates is that the evidence is often flimsy and, in fact, they would just arrest or coerce other people for their testimonies, and it’s very arbitrary.

It’s all dependent on bilateral relations. And of course, they would say that it’s never hostage diplomacy. But we can judge for ourselves.