Cheng Lei’s poignant prison message from the heart

Chinese Australian journalist Cheng Lei.

Cheng Lei’s statement is poignant, powerful and shocking. Writing, or rather dictating, from a Chinese prison, she has offered a hymn of praise to Australia and all the things we love about our place.

More than that, she has revealed the barbaric conditions the Chinese government imposes on an innocent Australian citizen purely as part of its grotesque hostage diplomacy.

She gets to stand in the sunlight for 10 hours a year. Her bedding is freshened in the sunlight for two hours a year.

Cheng Lei is an innocent Australian who has been imprisoned cruelly and without cause entirely to give the Chinese government an extra bit of leverage against the Australian government.

Beijing’s army of Australian apologists should tell us how they reconcile this savage hostage diplomacy with their benign vision of the Chinese Communist Party.

If you are not moved, beyond politics, by Cheng Lei’s final line – most of all, I miss my children – then you are not a human being.

This eloquent, guileless and sunlit statement from one of our own reveals more than anything else the reality of the communist regime in China.

This should put a severe limit on the federal government’s efforts to stabilise the relationship with Beijing.

Should Anthony Albanese ­really visit Beijing while the Chinese Communist Party holds innocent Australians hostage in this fashion?

Beijing will surely release the Australians in time. It will dole out these elementary concessions as rewards for the Australian government not speaking out of turn about Beijing, as part of its ruthless and amoral calculation of incentives and disincentives in coercing other nations to its will.

But make no mistake. The minute Beijing decides it needs more leverage against Canberra, it will take another swag of Australian citizens hostage in Beijing.

This is not a polity with which we can have a fully normalised relationship, even while we try to have a stable relationship and do some business for our mutual benefits.

We should still be trying to diversify our trade and investment away from Beijing and at the same time bolster our national security in every way we can.

There was not a word of politics in Cheng Lei’s statement. Her simple humanity puts the Chinese Communist Party to shame.

Canberra should take heed of the obvious lessons.