Cheng release in China’s interest

Australian journalist Cheng Lei’s return home to Melbourne after her nightmare 1154 days in a Chinese prison is good news ahead of Anthony Albanese’s expected trip to Beijing. Joy over her release must be tempered, however, by the fact Australian writer Yang Hengjun remains imprisoned in China and that the Chinese Communist Party’s lawless hostage diplomacy casts a dark shadow over the country’s relations with many democracies, including Australia.

Beijing may have decided that with the Prime Minister’s visit pending it would be in its own interest to release Cheng, just as the CCP cynically has lifted bans on some Australian imports, including coal and barley. Welcome as Cheng’s release is, Mr Albanese would be unwise to see it as anything more than a self-serving gesture by China. Legitimate criticisms of China at the time Cheng was arrested in August 2020 remain unanswered.

It is nonsense for Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin to assert, as he did on Wednesday, that a Beijing court’s imposition of a sentence of two years and 11 months’ jail on Cheng for illegally sharing state secrets answers questions surrounding her incarceration and appalling treatment. The claim by China’s most powerful security agency that Cheng, an anchor at China’s state broadcaster CGTN before her arrest, had violated CGTN’s confidentiality clause by sharing information using her mobile is absurd. People who work in the media share information all the time. The reality, more likely, is that when she was arrested amid Beijing’s fury over Scott Morrison’s sensible call for a full investigation into the start of Covid-19, the CCP invoked its hostage diplomacy policy to pressure Australia.

Beijing runs a secretive judicial system that excludes even senior diplomats from the countries of foreigners on trial from courtrooms. And hostage diplomacy is part of its geopolitical strategy. Cheng, who wrote recently of being allowed only 10 hours of sunshine a year while in prison, was a victim of that strategy. So is Yang, who was arrested in late 2018. What is happening to him cannot be ignored. Mr Albanese’s trip to China is important to both nations. But nobody should forget that the regime that awaits him makes concessions only when it judges them to be to its advantage.