From Beijing Prison to Melbourne Stage: Australian Journalist Cheng Lei Turns Captivity Into Art

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A Life Interrupted

One day in August 2020, Cheng Lei's world collapsed without warning. The China-born Australian journalist — at the time a well-known anchor for CCTV's English-language "Global Business" program — was approached at the broadcaster's Beijing headquarters by a State Security Bureau official. She was told she was under investigation for supplying state secrets to foreign organizations. Then she was blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location.

What followed was 1,154 days of detention.

Cheng, now 50, had built her career over two decades in bilingual journalism across Asia. Originally from China, she had migrated to Australia as a 10-year-old and later returned to Asia at 25, leaving behind a career in accounting for one in front of the camera. Her life in Beijing had seemed settled. Her two children, however, happened to be visiting family in Melbourne when China sealed its borders in early 2020 due to COVID-19 — which meant they would not see their mother again for nearly three years.

The "Crime" That Wasn't

In October 2023, a Beijing court convicted Cheng Lei of illegally providing state secrets abroad and sentenced her to two years and eleven months in prison. By the time the verdict was handed down, she had already served nearly that entire period behind bars.

The supposed offense, as Cheng describes in her memoir published last year: she broke a press embargo by just seven minutes in May 2020, reporting on then-Premier Li Keqiang's announcement that China would set no economic growth target for the year — an unusually significant admission driven by pandemic uncertainty. Cheng says she was not aware any embargo was in place.

Critics and human rights advocates have long questioned whether the charge was anything more than a pretext.

Hostage Diplomacy — A Pattern, Not an Accident

Cheng herself believes she was a victim of what analysts call "hostage diplomacy" — the practice of detaining foreign nationals as political leverage.

The timing supports her suspicion. On April 19, 2020, Australia's then-Foreign Minister Marise Payne publicly called for an independent international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. Four days later, China's Ministry of State Security opened an investigation into Cheng "on suspicion of endangering state security."

Australia had already issued warnings to its citizens about the risk of arbitrary detention in China. By September 2020 — just weeks after Cheng's arrest — all Australian journalists working for Australian media had quietly left the country. The last two, from the Australian Financial Review and the ABC, were separately questioned by Chinese police about Cheng before being permitted to depart.

The broader relationship between Australia and China was deteriorating rapidly. Beijing refused to take calls from Australian ministers and imposed unofficial bans on Australian exports including wine, coal, barley, and lobsters. The trade war only began to ease after Australia's center-left Labor government came to power in May 2022, replacing the conservative administration Beijing had clashed with so fiercely.

Inside China's Shadow Detention System

The most grueling phase of Cheng's imprisonment, she says, was not the prison itself — it was the first six months. She was held under what Chinese authorities call "Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location," known by the acronym RSDL.

RSDL is a legally sanctioned but widely criticized form of pre-trial detention that keeps individuals in near-total isolation, under constant surveillance, with strict limits on movement and enforced silence. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented its use as a tool of psychological coercion — designed, critics say, to break detainees into providing guilty pleas before any formal proceedings begin.

Despite serving six months under RSDL, Cheng was only credited with three months toward her eventual sentence.

"Authorities focus from the outset on breaking prisoners," she has said, describing the experience as one of "stultifying monotony" combined with relentless psychological pressure.

To stay sane, she built imaginary television programs in her mind, invented memory games, and found quiet ways to connect with her cellmates — three other women sharing a small cell around the clock, every day, for years.

Speaking for Those Without a Voice

Cheng is acutely aware that her story is not unique — and that most people living it never get to tell it.

Another Australian, Yang Hengjun, remains detained in China. The Chinese-born democracy blogger was sentenced in 2024 — receiving a suspended death sentence after being convicted of espionage, following years of detention that began when he arrived in China on a flight from the United States in 2019. His supporters fear he may not survive a lengthy imprisonment given his reportedly deteriorating health. Australian officials continue to press Beijing for his release.

"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."

She added: "For the people who are too scared to talk because their families are hostages in China — this is for them too."

From Cell to Stage

Since her deportation from Beijing in October 2023, Cheng has rebuilt her life with striking energy. She now lives in Melbourne with her daughter Ava, 17, and son Alex, 15, and works as a TV news presenter and columnist for Sky News Australia.

Her memoir has been published. And on May 28, 2025, her theatrical play — titled 1154 Days — premieres in Melbourne. The production, developed with a theater company, dramatizes her time in detention and explores how the human mind adapts, resists, and even creates under extreme pressure.

"It's about how it feels to have everything taken away from you," Cheng said. "How it feels to be watched every minute of the day — and how it feels to finally regain your freedom."

She frames the experience not only as trauma, but as transformation.

"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.

Finding Humor in the Darkest Places

Perhaps the most unexpected chapter of Cheng's reinvention: stand-up comedy.

Eight months after her release, she stepped onto a Melbourne stage for the first time as a comedian — performing alongside Chinese-born Australian activist and writer Vicky Xu. In February 2025, she competed in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival's RAW Competition for newcomers.

Her material? Prison, naturally.

"If you can't joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor," she told the Australian Financial Review. "Life is a tragic comedy and we should mine it. I just have a bit more material than others."

The laughter, she says, was never just entertainment. It was survival — something that brightened even the darkest corners of her cell and helped her and her fellow inmates endure.

A Warning About China's "Rule of Law"

Cheng is careful and deliberate in her public role. She wants audiences — in theaters and beyond — to look critically at China's claim to be a just, law-abiding society, particularly as Beijing positions itself as a stable alternative to what it characterizes as an unpredictable United States.

Her story, she argues, tells a very different truth: that foreign nationals — including journalists — can be detained arbitrarily, tried in secret, and convicted on charges that bear little scrutiny. That a seven-minute embargo break can become a state secret. And that the line between a journalist and a political hostage can vanish overnight.

For Cheng Lei, the stage, the page, and the microphone have become her tools of resistance. The play runs. The memoir sells. And the comedian takes the stage again.

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Sources

1. Associated Press – "An Australian journalist turns her harrowing China prison ordeal into a memoir and play": https://apnews.com/article/australia-china-prison-play-cheng-lei-97af789380e58d775ee4fddee46898cb
2. Human Rights Watch – "China: 'Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location'": https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/26/china-secret-detention-threatens-rule-law
3. Amnesty International – Yang Hengjun case update: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/7739/2024/en/
4. Reuters – Australia-China trade war and diplomatic freeze: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australia-china-relations-timeline-2021-09-15/
5. BBC News – "Who is Yang Hengjun?" background profile: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47464196

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