An uncomfortable question lingered over the Shanghai studio where Tony Jones was hosting a special episode of Q&A. The ABC program had come to China's commercial capital in April 2014 and one of the panellists that night was the Australian journalist and news anchor Cheng Lei, who worked for China's state-run CCTV.

Cheng, whose detention by Chinese authorities was made public on Monday, had been mildly critical of Beijing for much of the program and was eventually asked if she'd had to compromise her "integrity" to work for CCTV, the national broadcaster and one of the key propaganda arms of the Communist Party.