Cheng another victim of Xi’s alarming era of oppression
The world is still in the dark as to why an Australian journalist is being detained by China.
As Cheng Lei, an Australian single mother of two young children, woke Saturday morning in a Beijing prison, she was aware that she had just started her second year in severe custody but was still unaware of what she is supposed to have done wrong.
She was the prominent anchor for business programs on the state-owned China Global Television Network. And as the fluently bilingual and convivial go-to host for many of the big events for the Australian community, she was one of the best-known and most popular Australians in China.
Six months after she was shockingly taken into custody, the Chinese authorities said she had been detained for “providing state secrets or intelligence to foreign entities” – without providing any details. She has not been charged formally, nor permitted for the whole year to speak directly with her children, aged 10 and 12, who are being cared for by Cheng’s mother in Melbourne.
The offence with which she has been connected is as vague as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a charge regularly used for jailing questioning journalists or lawyers, as is the more serious “inciting subversion of state power” that often involves a sentence of 10 years or more.
Her friends and acquaintances are also still puzzled. She had no special political contacts, or even interests beyond the usual conversational range of a lively journalist. Her career focus has been on the business world – she has a commerce degree from Queensland University – in Australia and in China.
Concern for Cheng’s plight has united Australian journalists otherwise often on opposing sides of politics, from The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy to Sky’s Andrew Bolt, and including distinguished China experts such as Richard McGregor, who are among the many who have signed a letter calling for her immediate release.
Amnesty International Australia also calls for her to be freed “unless there is sufficient credible and admissible evidence that she has committed an internationally recognisable offence”.
She was held for constant interrogation for the first six months of her incarceration at a secret site under “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” – a process that uses what are widely known as “black jails” and not part of the formal judicial system.
Her physical conditions have improved since she was transferred to a more conventional detention centre where she shares a cell, 24 hours a day, with two other women.
Cheng, aged 46, has been able, at least once, to see her lawyer, who has informed her that her case has been referred to the procuratorate, which both investigates and prosecutes. She has been allowed occasional consular “visits” from the Australian embassy in Beijing, but only via video link. A wooden board is locked into place across the arms of Cheng’s chair, to prevent her from standing during these conversations.
Cheng, who shifted to Australia when she was 9 with her family from China’s Hunan province, has recently been allowed to receive some letters on her birthday, “making it such an unforgettable day”, and to obtain books, saying about reading Peter Carey: “It’s like getting jolts of electricity, it’s amazing being able to read Aussie literature”.
She hoped her family would be able to make a special effort to celebrate her son’s recent birthday – “I’ve always been big on family birthdays”.
Small gifts that she has been allowed to receive mean a lot – such as two T-shirts, “not the most chic-looking, but much better than the XXXL shirts” routinely provided.
She appears to be a particularly poignant pawn in a political game.
Global Times has said Australia has “hyped” Cheng’s plight. Some Australians – including academics and retired diplomats – have talked and written about a “tit for tat” scrap between the countries.
On the one hand, Australia has passed legislation against foreign interference in general, cancelled a memorandum committing Victoria to China’s hallmark international strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, urged an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, sent police to the homes of four Chinese state journalists, and cancelled the multiple-entry visas of two Chinese academics.
On the other, Beijing has launched a campaign of commercial coercion halting the import of at least seven major categories of Australian products, its senior Chinese officials refuse to speak with Australian counterparts, it has effectively expelled almost all Australian journalists, it has been found ultimately responsible for some cyber attacks, and it has seized Cheng.
This does not add up to “tit for tat”. The weighting of actions lurches heavily to one side.
What has changed since Cheng started working in Beijing, since Australia and China agreed their free trade agreement, since the relationship was mutually respectful?
China has changed massively and rapidly under the revolutionary, Leninist leadership of Xi Jinping. Many, both inside China and out, have been tripped up by the speed and the relentlessness of Xi’s imposition of his New Era, sweeping away the Old Era of reform-and-opening-up led by Deng Xiaoping. Cheng is one of very many victims.
Both of the two most brilliant Chinese people out of very many impressive folk I have interviewed in 25 years of covering China as a journalist were jailed for their freedom-loving views. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace laureate, died grimly of liver cancer while still incarcerated. Jimmy Lai, the entrepreneur and publisher, the first high-profile figure to be charged under Hong Kong’s draconian new National Security Law, is serving 20 months in jail. The details of the “crime” itself or of the usually ultra-vague framing of the relevant law, are of far less consequence in such cases than being willing to demonstrate, by signing a formal “confession”, acknowledgment of the absolute supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and acceptance of the need to defer to its moral authority.
A “re-set”, a return to the template of “engagement” between Australia and China, an attempt, however valiant, to create “back-channels” to communicate with recalcitrant senior officials in Beijing, a return to the pioneering days of establishing the diplomatic relationship with the People’s Republic in 1971, are all likely to prove in vain under today’s circumstances. The posture of the ruling Communist Party on its centenary a few weeks ago underlines that.
China’s change under Xi is too comprehensive, and there are few if any incentives for Chinese officials to pick up the phone in the era of rapid promotion for wolf-warriors.
But Xi did declare during the ruling Communist Party’s centenary celebrations on July 1 that it provides “a new model for human advancement”. Cheng’s friends rightly insist that there must still be room, in such a model, for human empathy, and for fairness.
Cheng, who was appointed a Global Alumni Ambassador for Australia, said not long before her seizure that “Australian education and cultures and values are all enmeshed together and mean a lot of respect for freedom. Australian education allows you the freedom to think for yourself and to question even text books and teachers, and to judge for yourself”.
Such values appear inimical to those now being imposed from the top in China today. It’s all the more important for Australians to persist in pressing for freedom for Cheng Lei, and thus to provide the opportunity for China to show, on the eve of hosting the Winter Olympic Games, that it can still share those human values we saw so liberally and touchingly displayed by the organisers, volunteers and athletes during the Tokyo Olympics.
If the coming Games are, however, framed like the 2008 Summer Olympics as a pageant for the party-state, then it would surely discomfort any Australian involved to be doing so in the very city where Cheng is being so cruelly incarcerated.
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.
