After three years as a prisoner in Beijing, Cheng Lei is busy rebuilding her life. She’s written a memoir and a play, tried her hand at stand-up comedy and is pursuing her career as a journalist.
She has shone a rare spotlight on the harsh conditions within the secretive Chinese prison system. She has also shared a personal story of resilience about how meaning can be found 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 a play about her incarceration, “1154 Days.”
“For me, it’s a fuller appreciation of life and much more adventurousness and also a serene sort of quiet fearlessness,” she added.
Drama is part of former prisoner’s new lease on life
Creating theater is one of the new experiences that have become part of the China-born Australian’s post-prison life that began when she was deported from Beijing in October 2023.
She became an Australian citizen after migrating from China as a 10-year-old with her parents. She described herself as a bored accountant when she left Australia at the age of 25 in pursuit of a media career.
Cheng had become an anchor for the “Global Business” show on China state broadcaster CCTV English, after building a career in bilingual journalism in Asia over two decades. That life ended 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 led away 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 period behind bars by the time she was sentenced.
Her crime involved breaking by seven minutes an embargo in May 2020 on the then-Chinese Premier Li Keqiang ‘s annual report that revealed, unusually, no economic growth target would be set for China that year due to pandemic uncertainty, Cheng wrote in her memoir published last year. She said she hadn’t been aware of an embargo.
Australia warned its citizens of arbitrary detention in China
Cheng believes she was a victim of hostage diplomacy, punished as an Australian citizen because her government had demanded an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. On April 19, 2020, Australia’s then-Foreign Minister Marise Payne called for an inquiry into the pandemic. China’s Ministry of State Security began investigating Cheng four days later on “suspicion of endangering state security.”
“Why me? Why that time? All these questions I’m still asking,” Cheng said.
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, the Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith and Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s Bill Birtles, left in September 2020, after diplomatic standoffs. They were separately interviewed by police about Cheng before they were allowed to leave China.
COVID sank a fraught relationship between Australia and China to new depths. A furious Beijing stopped taking phone calls from Australian government ministers. Official and unofficial bans were placed on Australian exports including wine, coal, barley and lobsters.
The conservative Australian government that so outraged China was replaced by the current center-left Labor Party government in elections in May 2022, before the trade blockades began to be removed.
Blogger’s plight in a Beijing prison remains a priority for Australia
Australian officials had raised Cheng’s detention at high-level bilateral meetings, just as they continue to pressure Beijing to release another Australian, Yang Hengjun.
The Chinese-born democracy blogger was given a suspended death sentence in 2024, after a Beijing court convicted him of espionage.
The 60-year-old has been in detention since he arrived in China on a flight from the United States in 2019. He is expected to learn within weeks whether his penalty will be changed to life in prison.
His supporters fear he wouldn’t survive a long prison sentence due to his deteriorating health.
Cheng said she feels responsible to those like Yang, who have fallen victim of the Chinese justice system, to speak out against it.
The worst period of her incarceration came at the start: six months under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, or RSDL.
Cheng said authorities focus from the outset on breaking prisoners to gain guilty pleas in an environment of isolation, constant surveillance, enforced silence and extreme restrictions on physical movement. Despite what she described as the “stultifying monotony” she endured, Cheng only got credit for three of her six months spent in RSDL toward serving her sentence.
Cheng finds a mission in speaking out for China’s voiceless inmates
“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,” she added.
The play premieres May 28 in Melbourne, where Cheng, 50, now lives with her daughter Ava, 17, and son Alex, 15. Both children had been visiting family in Melbourne when China closed its borders due to the pandemic in early 2020, months before Cheng’s arrest.
The play’s publicist says the work reveals how the mind adapts, resists and even 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 more simply: her work is about feelings.
“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 to be a just and ordered society that abides by the rule of law, as Beijing casts itself as a more reliable international partner than the United States under President Donald Trump.
Turning to humor for survival
Another first for Cheng’s post-prison life is stand-up comedy. She first took to a Melbourne stage in June 2024 — eight months after she was freed — with Chinese-born Australian activist and writer Vicky Xu.
“If you can’t joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor,” Cheng told the Australian Financial Review at the time. “Humor got me through much of it and brightened the cell for me and my cellmates.”
Cheng gave a five-minute performance at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW Competition for newcomers in February and is keen to perform more. She joked with her audience that she’d need a longer slot to cover her story of imprisonment in China for so-called espionage.
“Life is a tragic comedy and we should mine it,” Cheng quipped. “I just have a bit more material than others.”
