TV anchor Cheng Lei becomes a pawn in Beijing’s cruel game

Cheng Lei is ‘not a person to be interested in uncovering or divulging state secrets’.

Cheng Lei is China’s least likely political prisoner. And of all the thousands of Australians stuck overseas, she should be top of the list to be brought home. She was a highly professional host for business shows on CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster in English. She dated, on and off, Nick Coyle, chief executive of the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. They were a convivial couple. Cheng’s 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son had been sent to stay with her mother in Melbourne after COVID-19 caused their school to be closed in Beijing about a year ago.

Cheng was taken into custody by the authorities under an arbitrary mechanism known as “residential surveillance at a desig­nated location”. Those so detained are held for political reasons, not for offences recognisable in most jurisdictions as criminal. They are kept incommuni­cado in secret locations. They are denied access to family members or to lawyers, or to reading material. They are usually constantly interrogated.

The RSDL system is designed to extract maximum information, and to drive victim to “confess” to whatever crime is suggested. The legal structure of the People’s Republic is designed to ensure that at some stage the accused individual will concede that it is the Communist Party’s power and determination that must take precedence, that they must be wrong to defy it, that guilt is for the system to define and you to accept.

Cheng is being accused, says Foreign Minister Marise Payne, of “illegally supplying state secrets overseas”, under the catch-all Article 111 of the criminal code. Following six months’ RSDL, a formal investigation of elastic duration will begin, with a view to laying a charge. The new process should involve shifting Cheng into the prison system proper, which usually means better conditions. That’s the only good news.

The charge makes no sense to Cheng’s friends and peers. She has never been especially interested in politics, focusing her career on covering business, and simply had no access to coveted secrets. She enjoyed a bit of gossip but “she never had anything nefarious to pass on”, says a friend. “She had nothing to hide.”

In December, the authorities also took into custody Haze Fan, a Chinese citizen who is a news assistant at Bloomberg, accusing her of “jeopardising national security”. She is “one of Cheng’s best mates”, says a mutual acquaintance. So the cases could be related. But we — and the two accused women — may never know. Such charges that reach a court will be heard in secret. “State secrets” are not defined in the law, they can comprise almost anything. That any information thus defined might have been communicated without any indication even of confidentiality provides no protection.

Today, foreigners increasingly are perceived as threats to the party’s rule, thus the use of the new National Security Law that is subjugating Hong Kong by elevating “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements” to the most heinous of crimes.

Might Cheng be a victim of the breakdown of relations between Beijing and Canberra, highlighted by the 14 “sins” of which the former has convicted the latter? If so, turning her into collateral damage would appear a cruel way to underline a political message. Might one of her friends or contacts have strayed into the sights of the “rectification” campaign in the legal and security apparatus that was under way when Cheng was first detained, triggering a desire to interrogate her about them? Again, the pressure applied to her would seem disproportionate.

Cheng is not a person to be interested in uncovering or divulging state secrets of any kind. She loves reporting on the business world, hosting TV shows and live events. And she surely aches to be with her children again.

Rowan Callick, an industry fellow with Griffith University’s Asia Institute, was twice China correspondent for The Australian in Beijing.