Australian journalist Cheng Lei is rebuilding her life after enduring three years in a Beijing prison. She has written a memoir and a play, tried stand-up comedy, and continues her journalism career, shedding light on China's secretive prison system and sharing a story of resilience.
Finding meaning in suffering
“I think when your life gets shattered and you lose so many things that used to define you, you do have a kind of freedom to reorganize your atoms and create a new you,” Cheng told The Associated Press during rehearsals for her play, “1154 Days.” She added, “For me, it’s a fuller appreciation of life and much more adventurousness and also a serene sort of quiet fearlessness.”
Drama becomes part of her new life
Creating theater is among the new experiences that have become part of Cheng’s post-prison life since she was deported from Beijing in October 2023. Born in China, she became an Australian citizen after migrating at age 10. She described herself as a bored accountant when she left Australia at 25 to pursue a media career. Cheng became an anchor for “Global Business” on China’s state broadcaster CCTV English, building a career in bilingual journalism over two decades.
Her life changed abruptly in August 2020 when a Beijing State Security Bureau official told her at CCTV headquarters that she was being investigated for supplying state secrets to foreign organizations. She was blindfolded and taken to a secret location. A Beijing court convicted her in October 2023 of illegally providing state secrets abroad and sentenced her to two years and 11 months in prison. She had almost served that time by sentencing.
The crime and its context
Her crime involved breaking an embargo by seven minutes on then-Premier Li Keqiang’s annual report in May 2020, which unusually revealed no economic growth target for China due to pandemic uncertainty, Cheng wrote in her memoir. She said she wasn’t aware of the embargo. Cheng believes she was a victim of hostage diplomacy, punished as an Australian citizen because her government demanded an investigation into COVID-19’s origins. On April 19, 2020, Australia’s then-Foreign Minister Marise Payne called for an inquiry. China’s Ministry of State Security began investigating Cheng four days later.
“Why me? Why that time? All these questions I’m still asking,” Cheng said.
Impact on Australia-China relations
A month before Cheng’s arrest, Australia warned its citizens they risked “arbitrary detention” in China. All Australian journalists working for Australian media soon left. The last two left in September 2020 after diplomatic standoffs. COVID sank the fraught relationship between Australia and China. A furious Beijing stopped taking calls from Australian ministers and imposed bans on Australian exports including wine, coal, barley, and lobsters. The conservative Australian government that outraged China was replaced by a center-left Labor government in May 2022, before trade blockades began to be removed.
Speaking out for others
Australian officials raised Cheng’s detention at high-level meetings and continue to pressure Beijing to release another Australian, Yang Hengjun, a Chinese-born democracy blogger given a suspended death sentence in 2024 for espionage. The 60-year-old has been detained since 2019. His supporters fear he wouldn’t survive a long sentence due to deteriorating health. Cheng said she feels responsible to speak out against the Chinese justice system for those like Yang.
The worst period of her incarceration was six months under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). Cheng said authorities focus on breaking prisoners to gain guilty pleas through isolation, constant surveillance, enforced silence, and extreme restrictions on movement. Despite enduring “stultifying monotony,” she only got credit for three of those six months toward her sentence.
“I know people who are still going through RSDL, or unfair, unjust, arbitrary detention in China. Or being sentenced to ludicrous, harsh sentences for standing up for other people, for standing up for human rights,” Cheng said. “They would want this story to be told because they don’t have a voice. And for the people who are too scared to talk because their families are hostages in China, this is for them too.”
The play and its message
The play premieres May 28 in Melbourne, where Cheng, 50, now lives with her daughter Ava, 17, and son Alex, 15. Both children were visiting family in Melbourne when China closed its borders due to the pandemic in early 2020, months before her arrest. The play’s publicist says it reveals how the mind adapts, resists, and creates under pressure. “In isolation, she built television programs in her head, devised memory games and found unexpected ways to connect with herself, others and even with her captors,” a press release says. Cheng puts it simply: “It’s about how it feels to have everything taken away from you. How it feels to be with three other people all the time in the same little cell for three years, how it feels to be watched every minute of the day and how it feels to finally regain your freedom.” Cheng wants audiences to see through China’s claims of being a just and ordered society.
Turning to humor for survival
Another first for Cheng is stand-up comedy. She first took to a Melbourne stage in June 2024, eight months after being freed, with activist Vicky Xu. “If you can’t joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor,” Cheng told the Australian Financial Review. “Humor got me through much of it and brightened the cell for me and my cellmates.” She performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW Competition in February and is keen to do more. “Life is a tragic comedy and we should mine it. I just have a bit more material than others,” she joked.
