Cheng Lei China custody motives unclear
Australia’s diplomatic network does not know what led to Australian journalist Cheng Lei’s detention in Beijing more than a fortnight ago.
Australia’s diplomatic network does not know whether internal Chinese politics, the toxic bilateral relationship or perhaps a freethinking Facebook post led to Australian journalist Cheng Lei’s detention in Beijing more than a fortnight ago.
That has left the Morrison government highly concerned but unable to accurately assess whether the detention of the popular China Global Television Network anchor indicates a raised threat for other Australians in mainland China.
“We genuinely don’t know if this is coercion, or punishment, or something else. We don’t know,” a diplomatic source told The Australian.
Cheng — whose two young children are with her parents in Melbourne — has joined a burgeoning list of tensions between Australia and its biggest trading partner that has led to an unprecedented deterioration in the bilateral relationship.
Adding to the fallout of the extraordinary arrest, Cheng’s former partner is Nick Coyle, the long serving chief executive of the China-Australian Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, which represents the Australian business community in China’s capital.
Mr Coyle, who remains in Beijing, would not comment on the situation.
At a regular press conference in Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Tuesday evening said “China is a country of rule of law.
“If you want more info, I can ask competent authorities. I have nothing to offer here.”
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne had earlier cautioned against interpreting Cheng’s detention as being caught up in the fractious bilateral relationship.
“I would not describe it in that way. It is speculative at best to engage in that sort of premise,” she said.
Cheng is being held under what the opaque Chinese system calls “residential surveillance at a designated location”.
It is a type of detention in which investigators can interrogate a detained suspect for up to six months while cutting them off from lawyers and the outside world.
No charges have been made.
Australian diplomats have had a single conversation with Cheng over video — on August 27 — which focused on her physical and mental condition.
Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador in Beijing, said he was “astonished” by the detention of his long standing friend.
“She’s a good operator,” Mr Raby told The Australian.
“She understood the system really well.
“I don’t see it in any way directly connected to the bilateral relationship but you can’t rule out the timing as being connected in some way,” he said.
Two Australian journalists have been forced to leave China this year, Philip Wen from The Wall Street Journal and Chris Buckley from the New York Times.
High-profile hosts at China’s state-controlled broadcasters have been detained in recent years. In 2014, Rui Chenggang — a star anchor at CGTN’s sister channel CCTV — was detained after being swept up in President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign on obscure charges.
He was reportedly sentenced to six years after an opaque legal process.
In a Facebook post in March, Cheng wrote about the censorship of a magazine profile of a doctor in Wuhan who had been punished after raising alarm about the coronavirus. “The article lived for a few hours, and then the purge started,” Cheng wrote in a post that was unusual for a state media presenter in the highly controlled Xi era.
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