A thousand days in prison: Cheng Lei was betrayed by the country she loved, says partner Nick Coyle

Facebook images of Australian Chinese Journalist Cheng Lei, she is accused of leaking state secrets, pictured with partner Nick Coyle SourcE:, https://www.facebook.com/lei.cheng.7

Cheng Lei and I first met, rather appropriately, at a wine dinner in Beijing in 2013. I was new in town and had just taken up a role with the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce.

Lei was this vivacious, glamorous, pocket rocket Aussie TV anchor. Me and her together? I thought it would never happen.

Fast-forward 12 months to October 2014 and we are flying together from Beijing to Sydney and on to my alma mater, the University of Newcastle, where we were both booked to speak. As we all know, long-haul flights next to the wrong person can be excruciating. But this one certainly wasn’t.

Australian Chinese Journalist Cheng Lei.

Being a gracious host, I offered to show her around my home town. On an evening stroll on the Newcastle breakwall, overlooking Nobby’s Head, things took an unexpectedly romantic turn. It must have been all of that sea air. Confronting the unexpected would be a theme for our relationship.

For the next six years there were plenty of ups and downs. Then Covid, with all it entailed, finally broke us. But the worst was still to come.

It was a warm Beijing August in 2020 and life was pretty normal, even as the rest of the world was in some form of lockdown. I had my birthday coming up on August 14. Lei and I were in a better place. We had been talking a lot and planning to catch up for dinner that weekend.

But dinner never happened. Instead, sometime mid-morning on August 13, while leaving her apartment to go to work, Lei was taken by China’s Ministry of State Security.

Now 1000 days later, we still don’t know why she was taken, why she was charged with deliberately vague national security breaches or when she might be with us again.

The other victims of the opaque Chinese legal system in this case have been her two children, then nine and eleven.

Cheng Lei and Nick Coyle

She can’t tell you her story, share with you her courage, humour and commitment to those close to her, or explain how she is finding meaning while going through something nobody should have to. So I will give it a try.

Lei’s Australian story begins with talented, hardworking immigrant parents. Born in Hunan, China, 1975, to a physicist mother and metallurgical scientist father, she came to Australia at the age of 10 and took to the Aussie way of life like a kid to Vegemite. Listening to her broad Australian accent leaves you in no doubt.

Like most Chinese parents, her mum and dad wanted Lei to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant, but the ever inquisitive Cheng Lei always wanted to be a journalist. So after pleasing her parents by getting top marks, an accounting degree, a CPA certification and a few very useful years of commercial experience, Lei came back to the land of her birth to try to become an Australian success story in China. And that she did, but in her real passion as a journalist, first with CNBC and then CGTN.

Her six months of detention in China’s notorious “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” system were the most difficult. A person whose life was filled with social interaction, family and the vanity of TV was now stripped, literally, of everything.

The only contact with the outside world was a 30-minute video consular visit, which started each month with Lei being led in, blindfolded and handcuffed, before being placed in a chair with a timber restraint to limit her movement during her 30 minutes of “freedom”.

Recently, I went back over the embassy reports of those monthly visits and chatted to a friend who has been through it. “RSDL is hell,” was all my friend said to me. He’s right. To this day, I cannot adequately explain how Lei coped. After the six-month RSDL phase ended, her elation at having cellmates and fresh air for two hours a day in a 3m by 3m courtyard, surrounded by bars, was palpable.

However, the ironies abound. This is the darkest period in Lei’s life, but the lights are always on. The loneliest period, but she is always watched. The love for her children, now 11 and 14, is eternal. She wonders who their friends are and what they are doing each day. For a mother not to see her children for 1000 days is excruciating. To not be able to be there for them is agonising.

I recently passed on some advice given by a friend who knows better than most what Lei is going through. In true survivor’s style my friend suggested she get the most out of her time in the “twilight zone”. To read, reflect, study, meditate and imagine that she has chosen to go on a monastic digital detox retreat.

Lei is doing all of that and more. Wasting time and not making the best of any situation is not in her DNA. They may have taken her out of the world, but they can’t take the world out of her.

The irreverent Aussie humour is still firmly intact. She jokes about a new marketing strategy for the detention centre, extolling its benefits for those who hate their families, are on the run from organised crime or suffer from haphephobia. She says she’s boxed in grey, but laughs in technicolour.

I get asked all of the time when this phase of the Cheng Lei story will come to an end. I hope and pray it will be soon.

Cheng Lei is an immensely proud Australian but she is also proud of her Chinese heritage. It is sad and ironic that her ongoing detention makes so many Australians and fair-minded people around the world furious with China. She would not want it that way. We all hope sanity prevails and this warm, loving, deeply funny journalist, friend and partner can be with us again. Most importantly, we hope her two children can have their mum back. This has to end.

Nick Coyle served as chief executive of the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce, 2013 -2022