Cheng Lei: ‘I'm catching up on four years. I missed my children so much'

'That is a crotch shot!' says Cheng Lei, laughing at my phone's screensaver. I tell her it's a picture of my legs but she's sceptical and laughs even more. You could be forgiven for expecting Cheng, 49, to be serious and sombre: the journalist spent two years and three months in prison in China for an absurd crime. Detained as a spy and kept in isolation for months, she was constantly watched by guards, and did not hear the voices of her two children for years.
But she displays a quick wit, a devilish sense of humour and a relaxed laugh. She switches between analysing the rise of the Ministry of State Security under President Xi Jinping, to laughing about how the ladies in her cell would share a book about male yoga. Let's just say it was not for the poses.
It's the second day of winter, and the morning sun is warming Melbourne's Botanical Gardens. We're strolling past rows of camellias and rhododendrons.
Cheng says she picked this spot because of the colour. 'Look at where we are' she says as tears well in her eyes. It's been 19 months since she was released from prison and returned to Australia, thanks to intensive and high level diplomatic efforts by Australia during a period of worsening relations with China. She is still adjusting.
'I compare it to being a newborn, so every sensation is very intense,' she says.
'It's almost too much, but in a good way.'
Cheng's book about her time in prison, Cheng Lei: A Memoir of Freedom, is frank and – like her – funny, describing everything from the excruciating boredom and psychological torture she experienced in prison, to her secret orgasms (turns out, prison does not kill your libido). No topic is left off the table. Between jokes about menstruation and constipation, Cheng offers her readers a rare glimpse of the secret world of China's state control. 'It gives you an insight into how they think about espionage, about state security,' she says. 'It's about how insecure they are.'
In prison Cheng and other inmates slept on a piece of wood, the toilet walls were made of glass, and there was no caps for toothpaste tubes. Everything was grey. She recalls making a birthday sign for another prisoner, but even this was frowned upon by the guards. Prisoners were only meant to use pencils once a month to write letters home.
'We were underground, effectively in a coffin. And so tightly guarded,' she says.
A lot of the time, she was trying to escape boredom. She would ask the guards and her family and friends for new books – books that she could savour, that were long. So desperate was she for reading material she devoured a 700-page book on interest rates and even gave Einstein's Theory of Relativity a crack.
'I read enough to realise I didn't understand it,' she says.
Now, as she walks slowly through the gardens, she wipes away tears as she lists what she missed. Nature is something she keeps returning to. How much she still loves hearing Australian bird songs, and how, when she returned to Australia, going to the beach was one of the first things she wanted to do with her children, now 16 and 13.
In prison, there were times she forced herself not to think about her children because it became too much to bear.
When she was given her prison sentence, she immediately calculated how old her children would be when she was released. She missed her daughter's first day of high school, and cheering on her son at soccer. Missing them was more suffocating than her small cell.
'I didn't know if I'd ever see them again,' she says. 'They had to go … all that time not sure when I'd be back.'
So when Cheng stepped off the plane she immediately went back into 'mum mode', she says.
'I'm catching up on four years,' she says. 'I just missed them so much.'
Cheng was born in China, but at the age of 10 her family migrated to Australia. She wanted to study journalism, but her father persuaded her to do commerce – there was no way Australian media companies would hire a Chinese reporter he said, half-joking that the popular and long-serving SBS TV presenter Lee Lin Chin wasn't retiring any time soon.
But unfulfilled, she ended up doing an internship at the Chinese state media company CCTV, before heading to Singapore and then back to the rebranded state network CGTN in 2012.
Her life in Beijing was big and fast, she was a glamorous TV presenter, her show watched by millions. She interviewed everyone from the Australian ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, to David Beckham. She visited embassies and rubbed shoulders with China's elite.
On 13 August 2020 she went to work thinking she was going to meet her boss about a new show proposal but instead walked into a meeting room filled with 20 people.
'I am informing you on behalf of the Beijing State Security Bureau that you are being investigated for supplying state secrets to foreign organisations,' one of them said.
They took her to her apartment, where they went through her rooms, confiscating all her electronic devices. Cheng says she was 'naive' – she knew she had done nothing wrong, and thought she would be released in two or three days.
After almost a year in prison, Cheng was charged with espionage, but her crime was innocuous: sending a private text message, eight words long, seven minutes too soon. She had allegedly broken a media embargo on a speech by the Chinese Premier by texting Bloomberg journalist, and then friend, Haze Fan, that there would be 'No growth target. GDP. 9 Min jobs target'.
Breaking a media embargo in Australia would merit, at most, a verbal slap from the boss and being dropped from a media list. It would be a shitty day at work, and you might need a whinge and a wine on the way home. But it wouldn't be a life-changing crime.
The original document Cheng had been given did not have an embargoed time on it. A year later, the prosecutor told security officials gathering evidence against her that they had to have proof it was embargoed for the case to go ahead.
'So they got the classification bureau to do up a document. Which they did, because they're all on the same side, and the state must win at all costs.'
In China, national security trials are often conducted in secret, with sentences announced sometimes months after the trial. The conviction rate is more than 99%.
Months after her arrest, she was charged, and told how long her sentence would be two weeks before her trial was due to finish.
Her friend Haze was also imprisoned, and Cheng could hear her down the corridor. By then, agents had combed through their 60,000 texts and interrogated her for hours on end about their friendship. She began to wonder if their friendship had been a dangerous transaction. Had she been used?
'Honestly, I went through a lot of anger. But then also wished she was in my cell, because she was more fun to talk to. She did suffer, and I want to talk to her, because I want some form of closure, and I want to find out what happened to her.'
Cheng says her arrest was more diplomatic pawn-playing than serious criminal conduct. 'If it wasn't [the embargo] they would have found something else,' she says. Now, after 19 months back at home, Cheng is a presenter on Sky News. In China, she is still hounded online by trolls, and state police have used a picture of her for an advertisement recruiting people to work for them breaking spies.
Cheng is reflective. For her whole life she has straddled two cultures and two countries, and she is now defined by having been caught in the middle of frosty relations between the two. But in prison, with endless time, she taught herself how to change her thoughts.
'There was a time I was in solitude in a really hot cell. I switched my thinking from 'Oh my gosh, this is horrible! Even my hair feels like it's on fire', to I imagine I love the heat.
'I was like, OK, I'm going to make chips. We got these horrible steamed potatoes and I would flatten them between bits of plastic packaging and then lay them out in the sun and check them every hour. It didn't really work, they were still a bit chewy.
'But it was something new and something fun.'
She now spends less time on Instagram and more time thinking about the people she loves. If someone honks at her, or she gets a traffic fine, she doesn't feel the stress she might once have. She shrugs and moves on.
'I love that I got to a space where I can see adversity for what it is. It's just a counterpoint,' she says. 'You never feel happy if you're happy all the time. Each annoyance is a chance to adapt.'
Cheng Lei: A Memoir of Freedom is out now through HarperCollins

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