Reporter's prison torture cost of political posturing

Perth Now

17-06-2025

When leaving a Chinese prison after more than three years inside, Cheng Lei was warned by a guard not to write about her experience.
The warning turned out to be futile, with the Chinese-Australian broadcaster launching her book, A Memoir of Freedom, to document her time on espionage charges.
Lei was the real-life chess piece in a volatile bilateral relationship between Australia and China, with her fate influenced by political posturing.
When then-foreign affairs minister Marise Payne called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 on April 19, 2020, it set in motion a series of events leading to Lei's arrest on trumped-up spying charges.
"On April 23, China starts surveilling Australians in China, myself included, (and I only discovered this) a year and a half later," Lei said at her book launch on Tuesday.
Breaking an embargo by seven minutes was the crime that exposed Lei to the wrath of Chinese authorities.
But it was Australia's deteriorating relationship with China under the coalition government that may have been the determining factor in the severity of her punishment.
The journalist, then working for China's state broadcaster, believes she was the victim of a "hostage-taking" due to the fracturing of the relationship between the two countries, immediately understanding the severity of her plight.
"Very early on in the piece I understood that, in the words of some of my friends, I was f***ed," Lei said on Tuesday.
It was only the change to Anthony Albanese's Labor government in 2022 where she saw an increase in privileges inside detention.
Crucially, a meeting between the prime minister and Chinese president Xi Jinping was followed by Lei hearing her children's voices for the first time in years.
"After that election in 2022, things began to look brighter - I got one phone call with my kids," she said.
Lei initially feared public outcry at home about her detention could lead to further torture and backlash inside the prison run by China's secretive Ministry of State Security.
Instead, the now-Sky News presenter says increased publicity led to guards treating her more carefully, "if not better".
"Thanks to ordinary Australians, thanks to my media peers that kept my story alive, that public pressure led to more political motivation," she said.
Despite her ordeal at the hands of the Chinese state, Lei is certain more reporting on China and its Australian diaspora is critical to understand the nuances of Australia's largest trading partner.
"There is this vast gulf of lack of understanding between mainstream Australian society and the diaspora, and China," she said.
"I don't think (the Australian media) even run stories about China or Chinese Australians, and that needs to change."