But curiosity within the People’s Republic of China is a very dangerous attribute, however much it may be leavened in Cheng’s case by her energy, warmth and acuity.
Within the past few months, Australian journalist Phil Wen, a leading reporter with The Wall Street Journal, has been expelled, followed by the doyen of Australian journalists covering China, top New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley.
Cheng, 44, has been for more than a decade one of the best known and liked Australians working in the PRC, compering many major functions including the annual Australia China Business Awards. She has written for The Australian, and has been a panellist on ABC TV’s Q&A.
Yet she has been detained for more than a fortnight already, by an unknown security agency at an unknown venue for unknown reasons for an unknown length of time.
When she was 10, Cheng came with her family from China’s Hunan province to Melbourne. An Australian citizen, she was educated in Australia, graduating in commerce from the University of Queensland. She then worked in the finance sector in Sydney, before trying her arm in the PRC, using her Chinese language skills.
She continued working there in finance before shifting to journalism — for China Central TV then for nine years for American business channel CNBC Asia in China and Singapore, before finding a prominent niche for the past eight years as the Beijing-based anchor of the business coverage of CGTN, the Chinese government’s global network, watched by millions of viewers internationally.
Instead of providing support, CGTN swiftly took down any mention of her on its website. Her posts at Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, were also removed. She became an Orwellian “unperson.”
Cheng, a single mother, has two school-age children who were staying with her family in Melbourne when she was arrested. The family issued a statement saying “in China, due process will be observed and we look forward to a satisfactory and timely conclusion to the matter. We ask that you respect that process …”
The family’s concern and reticence is entirely understandable, but it’s hard to respect a process that is opaque and strips those detained of their rights.
Her status in what the authorities describe formally as “residential surveillance at a designated location” allows her to be interrogated constantly for up to six months, without contact with family or lawyers, and without any charge being laid.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was permitted to communicate with her by video link on August 27.
Such a form of arrest is used for people accused by one of the state security agencies of endangering national security.
Cheng was a frequent Facebook poster, including regular reports on everyday life in the COVID-19 era in China.
She spoke about her sense of curiosity in a post celebrating her role as an Australian Global Alumni Ambassador. She also said “Beijing is the beating heart of China where politics, culture, commerce, technology collide.”
Politics is upstream of everything else, however, in the country where the Chinese Communist Party has ruled without elections for almost 71 years. And it must be presumed that this is where Cheng haplessly fell foul of the authorities, despite her keen intelligence and intricate understanding of how the PRC system works.
She posted on Facebook in March: “There’s still plenty of suspicion about how the virus came about.” Millions of people in China were not only thinking but even posting similar concerns.
It may be difficult to conceive of informal posts expressing widely held views being perceived as “endangering national security” but such is the party-state’s focus on surveillance and control that it is possible Cheng may have been detained simply because of her observations of everyday life in China under COVID.
Cheng is better connected with senior party-state officials than many journalists in Beijing, and it is also possible her detention is attributable to internal power struggles, with President Xi Jinping recently launching a new “rectification” campaign or purge.
There is conjecture two anchor presenters of the domestic national network China Central TV are also being subjected to interviews from the security apparatus at this tense time. But the lack of accountability of arresting authorities means it is unlikely we shall gain any clearer sense of why Cheng is being held for months or perhaps even longer.
Rowan Callick was twice The Australian’s China correspondent.
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“I’m a very curious person, I’ve always wanted to tell stories of which I have knowledge,” says Australian TV presenter Cheng Lei in a YouTube post describing the first quality of a good journalist, which she certainly is.