Almost eight months after being deported from China following three years of detention, Australian journalist Cheng Lei is methodically rebuilding her life in her current home of Melbourne, turning her experience of imprisonment into creative work and a platform to advocate for others still detained under China’s justice system.
Cheng first moved to Australia from China with her parents as a 10-year-old, eventually becoming a naturalized Australian citizen. At 25, she left a career as an accountant to pursue her passion for bilingual journalism, and over two decades of work across Asia, rose to become a high-profile anchor for the English-language *Global Business* program on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
That stable, public career came to an abrupt end in August 2020. At CCTV’s Beijing headquarters, state security agents took Cheng into custody, accusing her of leaking state secrets to foreign organizations. She was blindfolded and transferred to an unknown detention location. In October 2023, a Beijing court convicted her of the charges and handed down a sentence of two years and 11 months — a term she had already nearly completed behind bars by the time the ruling was issued.
According to Cheng’s memoir, the offense that led to her conviction amounted to a seven-minute premature release of data from former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s 2020 annual government work report. The early disclosure revealed that China would not set a formal GDP growth target that year amid uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a decision that was already unusual. Cheng maintains she had no knowledge of any media embargo surrounding the report at the time of the incident.
The journalist says she believes her detention was a case of hostage diplomacy, linked to Australia’s call for an independent international investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In April 2020, then-Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne publicly called for the inquiry; Chinese state security opened its investigation into Cheng just four days later. “Why me? Why that time? All these questions I’m still asking,” Cheng told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
Relations between Canberra and Beijing had already been tense before the pandemic, but the global health crisis plunged the fraught bilateral relationship to its lowest point in decades. After Australia called for the COVID origins probe, Beijing halted direct communications with senior Australian government ministers and imposed official and unofficial trade bans on a range of Australian exports, including wine, coal, barley and lobster. Tensions only began to ease after Australia’s conservative government, which had drawn Beijing’s ire, was voted out of power and replaced by the current center-left Labor government in 2022, after which most trade restrictions were gradually lifted.
Long before Cheng’s arrest, the Australian government had issued official warnings to its citizens about the risk of arbitrary detention in China. In the months after she was taken into custody, all Australian journalists based in China ultimately left the country, following high-stakes diplomatic standoffs in 2020.
Since her release and deportation in October 2023, Cheng has thrown herself into multiple creative pursuits to process her experience and amplify the voices of people who cannot speak for themselves. She has published a memoir about her detention, and is currently preparing for the world premiere of her autobiographical play *1154 Days*, scheduled to open in Melbourne on May 28. The play explores how the mind adapts, resists, and creates connection even under extreme conditions of deprivation and surveillance. Cheng says during her months in isolation, she built entire television programs in her mind, invented memory games, and found small ways to connect with her cellmates and even her captors.
“When your life gets shattered and you lose so many things that used to define you, you do have a kind of freedom to reorganize your atoms and create a new you,” Cheng explained during rehearsals for the production. “For me, it’s a fuller appreciation of life and much more adventurousness and also a serene sort of quiet fearlessness.”
Beyond theater and writing, Cheng has also branched out into stand-up comedy, making her first stage appearance in Melbourne in June 2024 alongside Chinese-Australian writer and activist Vicky Xu, eight months after her release. She performed a five-minute set at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW competition for new performers earlier this year, and says humor was a critical tool for survival during her detention. “If you can’t joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor,” she told the *Australian Financial Review*. “Humor got me through much of it and brightened the cell for me and my cellmates.” She now jokes that she has more source material for her comedy than most performers: “Life is a tragic comedy and we should mine it. I just have a bit more material than others.”
Cheng now lives in Melbourne with her two teenage children, who were stranded in Australia visiting family when China closed its borders at the start of the pandemic, months before her arrest. For Cheng, her new creative projects are not just a way to heal — she says she has a responsibility to speak out for other detainees still held in China, including fellow Australian citizen Yang Hengjun, a Chinese-born democracy blogger who was sentenced to a suspended death penalty for espionage in 2024. Yang has been in detention since he returned to China from the United States in 2019, and his supporters warn his failing health means he is unlikely to survive a life sentence, which a court is expected to greenlight in the coming weeks.
Australian officials have repeatedly raised Cheng’s case at high-level bilateral meetings with Beijing, and continue to push for Yang’s release. Cheng says her own experience of the Chinese prison system has given her a unique window into its harsh, opaque practices. The hardest part of her detention was the first six months, spent under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), a system where detainees are held in complete isolation, under constant surveillance, with strict limits on movement and enforced silence, designed to break suspects to force guilty pleas. Even after six months in that system, Cheng only received credit for three months toward her eventual sentence.
“I know people who are still going through RSDL, or unfair, unjust, arbitrary detention in China. Or being sentenced to ludicrous, harsh sentences for standing up for other people, for standing up for human rights,” Cheng said. “They would want this story to be told because they don’t have a voice. And for the people who are too scared to talk because their families are hostages in China, this is for them too.”
The play *1154 Days* seeks to cut through official narratives, Cheng explains, allowing audiences to see beyond Beijing’s public framing of itself as a rule-of-law society and reliable global partner. “It’s about how it feels to have everything taken away from you. How it feels to be with three other people all the time in the same little cell for three years, how it feels to be watched every minute of the day and how it feels to finally regain your freedom,” she said.