MELBOURNE, Australia — After three years as a prisoner in Beijing, Cheng Lei is busy rebuilding her life. She has written a memoir and a play, tried her hand at stand-up comedy and is pursuing her career as a journalist in Australia.
Cheng, a China-born Australian citizen, was detained in August 2020 while working as an anchor for the “Global Business” show on China state broadcaster CCTV English. 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 nearly completed that term by the time of sentencing and was deported from China in October 2023.
Her case drew international attention as an example of what Australian officials have described as arbitrary detention. Cheng believes she was targeted in retaliation for Australia’s call for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. On April 19, 2020, then-Foreign Minister Marise Payne requested such an investigation. Four days later, China’s Ministry of State Security began looking into Cheng on suspicion of endangering state security.
“Why me? Why that time? All these questions I’m still asking,” Cheng told The Associated Press during rehearsals for her play “1154 Days,” which premieres May 28 in Melbourne.
The journalist said her offense involved breaking an embargo by seven minutes in May 2020 on a report by then-Premier Li Keqiang that revealed China would not set an economic growth target that year because of pandemic uncertainty. She wrote in her memoir that she had not been aware of the embargo.
Cheng described the initial six months of her detention under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, or RSDL, as the most difficult period. She said authorities used isolation, constant surveillance, enforced silence and extreme movement restrictions to pressure prisoners into guilty pleas. Despite the conditions, she received credit for only three of those six months toward her sentence.
“I know people who are still going through RSDL, or unfair, unjust, arbitrary detention in China,” Cheng said. “They would want this story to be told because they don’t have a voice.”
The play explores how the mind adapts under pressure. According to a press release, Cheng built television programs in her head, devised memory games and found unexpected ways to connect with herself and her captors while in isolation. “It’s about how it feels to have everything taken away from you,” she said. “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 has also performed stand-up comedy, making her debut on a Melbourne stage in June 2024 alongside activist Vicky Xu. She told the Australian Financial Review that humor helped her survive imprisonment. “If you can’t joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor,” she said at the time. She performed a five-minute set at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW Competition for newcomers in February.
Her children, daughter Ava, 17, and son Alex, 15, were visiting family in Melbourne when China closed its borders in early 2020. Cheng now lives with them in the city and works as a TV news presenter and columnist for Sky News Australia.
Australia has continued to raise the cases of detained citizens with Chinese authorities. Officials have also pressed Beijing to release democracy blogger Yang Hengjun, who received a suspended death sentence in 2024 after being convicted of espionage. The 60-year-old has been detained since arriving in China from the United States in 2019 and is expected to learn soon whether his sentence will be changed to life in prison.
Cheng said she feels a responsibility to speak out for others caught in the Chinese justice system. “For the people who are too scared to talk because their families are hostages in China, this is for them too,” she said.
Her memoir, published last year, and the upcoming play aim to shed light on conditions inside China’s prison system while highlighting personal resilience. Cheng told the AP that losing much of what once defined her has brought a new sense of freedom. “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,” she said. “For me, it’s a fuller appreciation of life and much more adventurousness and also a serene sort of quiet fearlessness.”