Why the world needs the insights of Australian journalist Cheng Lei

With the imminent rise of a totalitarian regime of unprecedented wealth, power and reach, the world needs the insights and empathy of Cheng Lei, says SIMON BEVILACQUA

NEWS: Cheng Lei shows deep affection for China and a mind opened by Australian education.

THE Australian journalist detained without charge or explanation by Chinese authorities has in recent years been a rare glimpse of light and hope in dark and dangerous times.

Chinese-born, Australian-educated TV anchor Cheng Lei, with her gentle, intelligent delivery, kind smile and cross-cultural experience is a rare bridge-builder at a time nearly everyone is erecting walls.

With the imminent rise of a totalitarian regime of unprecedented wealth, power and reach, the world needs the insights and empathy that Cheng delivers as a TV journalist.

The daughter of Chinese migrants, Cheng arrived in Melbourne in 1985 at age 10. She studied commerce at the University of Queensland before working as an accountant for Cadbury-Schweppes and as an analyst for ExxonMobil.

She moved to China in 2000 to put her bilingual skills to use as a journalist. Starting at China Central TV’s English channel in 2003, she became the China correspondent for a business news service, before joining China Global TV Network in 2013 as anchor for its business show.

Cheng appeared on a 2014 special episode of ABCTV’s QandA about China that was broadcast live from Shanghai. She spoke openly of the “inadequacy of social welfare” in China and of multiple “levels of censorship” of the media, including daily propaganda notices that dictated journalists’ behaviour.

“All these things change over time,” she smiled, as patiently as she appeared genuinely hopeful.

An audience member asked how long it would be before China had its own QandA where citizens could quiz their leaders.

Emmy Award-winning former CNN reporter Mei Yan, also on the panel, answered the incendiary question, stressing how incredibly far the Chinese government had come in the past 30 years regarding free speech. Panel, host and audience nodded in agreement. Mei was right. When Chinese students asked similar questions in protests at Tiananmen Square just 25 years earlier, they were overrun by tanks.

“The fact we’re sitting here now doing this live broadcast shows China has changed,” Mei said, drawing support from the Chinese audience and a pertinent aside from host Tony Jones, who pointed out the broadcast was live to Australia, not China, and it was unknown how much would get past the censors in China, if anything.

In the many online videos of Cheng’s work as a journalist it is clear she has deep affection for the country of her birth, especially Beijing, but sees China with a mind that has been opened by an Australian education.

“Australian education and Australian cultures and values are all meshed together and that means a lot of respect for freedom, a lot of respect for creativity, individuality, and I think that has helped me so much in my work,” she says in one video.

“The beauty of an Australian education is not about what’s taught but more about what it doesn’t teach. It doesn’t teach you just to follow orders. It allows freedom to think for yourself, to question even textbooks, even professors, and to judge for yourself, which is critical in journalism.”

JUST months after Cheng spoke so hopefully about China on QandA, President Xi Jinping received a hero’s welcome in Tasmania, with Hobart schoolchildren lining the streets to cheer. Xi’s historic visit in 2014 was taken as a sign that China was joining the world, and the insular communist regime of old was gone and in its place was a more open, relaxed and personable regional neighbour. Analysts had long predicted China’s integration into the global economy would loosen the draconian grip of the party machine on the Chinese people.

But Xi had other ideas. In the six volatile years since, he has rewritten China’s laws to keep the presidency for the rest of his life. He has built an Orwellian 21st century surveillance state, linking hundreds of millions of public cameras to face-recognition technology and a central database.

Xi rules with an iron fist, jailing dissidents, booting out overseas journalists, and overseeing the secret horrors inflicted on Uighur Muslims.

Xi has reneged on his deal with Britain over control of Hong Kong, threatened Taiwan with military action, and militarised artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Xi’s relations with the US, Japan, India and Australia are vexed, and he is spending big on military capabilities.

China’s officials have dropped any facade of friendship with Australia in recent months, resorting to verbal abuse and trade sanctions. They say the Chinese people are incensed by Australia’s call for an independent probe into what happened in Wuhan when COVID-19 was first detected, and that such a call is racist.

Wuhan is the obvious place to start an investigation into the genesis of the virus, but where the probe leads is anybody’s guess. Ask the question, note the answer, move to the next question. Process leads the way. It’s detective work. It’s journalism.

And it’s probably why, on February 27, Cheng used Facebook to speak of investigative articles about cover-ups by Wuhan authorities and, again in March, told of a magazine story about a Wuhan doctor who claims to have been reprimanded by authorities for raising the alarm about COVID-19. “The article lived for a few hours, and then the purge started,” Cheng noted fatefully.

Then, last month, she vanished.

Detained in a secret location by Chinese authorities, under special powers that can keep her in custody for six months, Cheng is being denied visits by family or lawyers. Her two children and family in Melbourne can but wait and hope. Cheng’s glowing profile as a TV journalist with rare cross-cultural insight, and her incisive interviews with business leaders, have been wiped from the CGTN website as if she never existed.

Whatever China’s authorities are hiding in Wuhan must be bloody big if they are willing to make journalists vanish, abuse regional neighbours and impose trade sanctions to stop questions being asked. No amount of inordinate protestation and bitter retribution will work, though, because the Chinese whispers have been heard, and the world wants answers.