To really understand a regime, it seems, you need to see inside its political prisons. And in recent years, a succession of intelligent Australians has unwillingly performed that service and written good books about the experience.
The earliest was the journalist Peter Greste, whose The First Casualty described his 400 days in Cairo’s Tora jail. Then came Melbourne University’s Kylie Moore-Gilbert with The Uncaged Sky, her account of 804 days in Iran’s notorious Evin and other prisons. Then there was the economist Sean Turnell, who described his 650-days confinement in Myanmar’s Insein and other jails in An Unlikely Prisoner.
Now comes A Memoir of Freedom, journalist and television presenter Cheng Lei’s account of her even more drawn-out imprisonment: 1155 days mostly in the constantly florescent-lit, curtained, microphoned and CCTV-monitored cells of a prison on the outskirts of Beijing run by China’s state security ministry.
Until August 2020 Cheng was a star of China’s official outward-facing media, hosting a business program on the English-language service of China Global TV Network, CGTN, housed in a futuristic building designed by star Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, living in a comfortable apartment nearby, attending yoga sessions and parties with Chinese and foreign friends, and interviewing the Chinese entrepreneurs dazzling the world with their sudden successes.
Growing up, she’d spent her first ten years in rural Hunan before moving to Australia in 1985 with her academic scientist father. High school in Brisbane was followed by a commerce degree at the University of Queensland and a job in accountancy — and then the ultra-booming Chinese economy drew this bilingual Chinese-Australian into the TV world covering it.
All went well until an official visit to her office led to a roomful of serious state security officials and a search of her apartment. Informed she was under investigation for transferring state secrets to foreign organisations, she was blindfolded and taken to what she later learned was a security service jail at 47 Dahongmen Nanlu, in Beijing’s Fengtai district.
For six months she was under “residential surveillance at a designated location,” which sounds like house arrest but was actually a room with lights always on, curtains drawn, and a guard standing forty centimetres in front of her while another sat by her side. It was a world of no’s: no strenuous exercise, no arms inside the doona, no arms over the eyes, no turning to the wall, no talking, no moving while sitting, no items left in room. She had “never been more bored, more lonely, more afraid,” she recalls.
Her first consular visit by ambassador Graham Fletcher and other officials came after two weeks. She was allowed to change from her prison garb into her own clothes, ordered not to discuss her case, and taken blindfolded and strapped to a wheelchair to a room where she could talk to the embassy team, but only by a video link. Australia’s intercession at least got her some “fresh air”: fifteen minutes a day of open windows behind the curtains.
She constantly wondered what she had done to get this attention. She had posted cynical comments on social media about China’s “opaque and heavy-handed” response to the Covid outbreak that had started in Wuhan early that year. She was aware that Australia’s relations with China had chilled since foreign minister Marise Payne had proposed an international investigation of the origins of the pandemic and prime minister Scott Morrison suggested it should have “weapons inspector” powers.
She might also have been aware, but doesn’t mention in the book, that the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had conducted heavy-handed and well-leaked raids on the homes of Chinese state media representatives and others in June 2020.
She would later be told that state security had started investigating her on 23 April, four days after Payne’s public call. She was aware that two Canadians had been detained by the security service in response to Canada’s arrest of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a United States extradition warrant. (When Meng was freed, the two Canadians were taken straight to the airport for a flight home. Unbeknownst to Cheng, they had been held in the same jail as her.)
Despite the Canadian precedent, her chief interrogator insisted her case was “not hostage diplomacy.” She immediately thought of a saying among foreign correspondents in China: “It’s not true until a Chinese official denies it.” Wisely she bit her tongue.
Instead, her interrogators zeroed in on an incident on 22 May 2020 when Cheng had gone to her office early to report on the annual Work Statement given by the Chinese premier to the rubber-stamp legislature. It was due for release at 7.30am. Seven minutes ahead of that embargo, Cheng had texted some contacts with the headline news: because of Covid, China would not be setting a growth target for that year.
This was gold for her best friend Haze Fan, a producer with the financial information service Bloomberg. “News was her diet and scoops her G-spot,” Cheng says. A lead over rivals like Reuters measured in minutes or even seconds would help justify Bloomberg’s US$20,000-a-month subscriptions.
From then on, the interrogation centred on establishing whether Cheng’s text message amounted to leaking a state secret to a foreign organisation. (Her friend Fan was arrested too, but released within a year with no apparent charge.) Cheng was constantly given paper and pen to write about it in those terms. After two months, her interrogator said her latest effort was not “profound enough.” She asked what he meant. “You have to show we have done our jobs,” Li said. “Their job,” Cheng realised, “was to churn out iron-clad guilty pleas.”
As a French colleague and I discovered a long time ago when we were each issued with a blank sheet of paper to atone for unauthorised reporting in Henan province, China’s accused are invited to over-egg the narrative. As her detention went on into years, Cheng said she came to relish the opportunity for creative self-criticism.
“For me it was a welcome challenge to not repeat myself, to discover new phrases to admit sin and profess regret, to make promises of turning over a new leaf using original wording,” she writes. “‘They ask for turd; I have to turn in the best-looking turd,’ I told my cell-mates. When in doubt, intersperse the self-flagellation with praise for the officers and the system. Me bad; you good, very good. It was quite liberating, really, when truth wasn’t a goal and your audience wouldn’t know satire if they sat on it.”
After six months, Cheng passed from “residential surveillance” to a common cell in the same complex: a room shared with three to four other women, its floor space largely taken up with a six- by two-metre sleeping platform, with a glass-walled toilet and a hose for weekly showers and laundry — and, of course, sensitive microphones and cameras.
In contrast with the experiences of Greste, Moore-Gilbert and Turnell, she did not have morale-supporting dialogue with dissident intellectuals and other brave souls sharing the cells and exercise yards. With all inmates forbidden to talk about their cases, she got only sketchy, furtive information about who they were and of what they were accused. Among them was a district head accused of developer bribes, a Uighur cabin-crew member with alleged terrorist connections, an official arrested because she had reported being approached for secrets, a cardiologist serving eight years for sharing information with British researchers, a nuclear engineer suspected because of his studies in Japan. Her cellmates had been in for years, many still awaiting trial or verdict.
The randomness is perhaps designed to make the point that no one should feel safe. It’s part of the dichotomy facing the Chinese leader Xi Jinping: the more he gives state security free rein to tighten control around the Communist Party, the further he takes China from the innovation and individuality needed to lift it out of the middle-income trap and spread the benefits of development.
Cheng Lei soon decided to roll with the system, playing mind games and making the most of the erratic supply of books made available by guards or sent in by the embassy. She emerges as a robust character, undaunted by playground teasing as a newly arrived schoolgirl in Australia, being raped by an intruder as a teenager, two early marriages that didn’t work out, and a sense of having fallen into the gap between two worlds, two countries.
Living on a bland, protein-free prison diet made worse by food shortages during Covid, she lost much weight and shed some hair, and her periods dwindled. Bemoaning the enforced lack of femininity, she managed to sneak auto-eroticism past the cameras. It made sure everything still worked, she says. “It was also a fuck-you to the system — you can deny me everything but you can’t keep me from an orgasm.” Winston Smith would approve.
Her lawyer’s first visit came after ten months. He wanted her to plead not guilty: a prosecutor had told him the case was nonsense. She countermanded him. The prosecutor then made an implicit plea deal for a five-year jail term if she stuck to her confessions. She was driven out to a courtroom for a quick trial on 31 March 2022, with Ambassador Fletcher trying to attend but excluded.
More limbo followed as she waited for the sentence. Then came the May 2022 election in Australia, with Morrison’s government out and Labor in. At the end of the year, Anthony Albanese met Xi on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Jakarta. The freeze was thawing: Cheng Lei got a first phone call to her family in Melbourne, and later her first meeting with Fletcher and his team.
It took until 27 September 2023 for her case to unwind. She was brought back to court for sentencing. Judges, prosecutor and security officials were all beaming at their own beneficence: her sentence was two years, eleven months. With time in residential surveillance discounted by half, her release was eleven days away.
Those days dragged through endless bureaucracy. The Supreme Court had to endorse the unusually short sentence. It did of course, obeying orders. Finally she was on a flight to Melbourne, with Fletcher sitting beside her and foreign minister Penny Wong waiting to embrace her.
Ignoring admonishments from her jailers not to write bad things about the system, Cheng Lei has produced an enthralling and horrifying account of three years designed to be as colourless and depersonalising as possible. It even makes Cairo’s Tora, Yangon’s Insein and even Tehran’s Evin seem somehow preferable.
Cheng is remarkably easy on the figures that got her into it. At the very end of the book, she accepts as “convincing” the theory that her jailing was punishment for Marise Payne’s call for a Covid inquiry, though she says this “theory” comes from her partner, Nick Coyle. Perhaps that’s because she is now employed by Sky TV, a News Corp refuge for Scott Morrison–era politicos and their thinking, and the book is published by a News Corp imprint.
A new edition might look at the strange parallels between her case and that of Sun Lijun, an Australian-educated vice-minister of the public security ministry, the police counterpart of state security. His handling of the Covid epidemic led him into criticism of Xi Jinping’s leadership. He was arrested on the same day Marise Payne made her call, four days ahead of investigations into Cheng Lei. Cheng indicates the first she heard about the media conjecture linking her to Sun came with her lawyer’s first visit, and was a surprise. But did she know him? It’s a teasingly loose end.
A big personality, Cheng deserves a wider audience than Sky’s tiny viewership. She is also well qualified to be interlocutor in forums about trade and investment between Australia and China. But with visiting Chinese premier Li Qiang’s bodyguards blocking her from his sight at a press conference in Canberra last year, it seems likely that many in Australia–China circles — like those who allowed that incident to happen — will shy away from employing her talents. •
A Memoir of Freedom
By Cheng Lei | HarperCollins | $35.99 | 352 pages
