Australian journalist Cheng Lei has described the conditions and mental anguish of her incarceration in China as a “sophisticated and subtle” form of torture.
“While you are clothed and fed, you are warm, and you are safe — the safest you’ll ever be — you are undergoing, I think, the utmost pain emotionally, psychologically,” she told 7.30.
The mother of two said she was so fearful of a long prison sentence and not seeing her family again that at times she wanted to hurt herself.
“Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, these numbers would jump at me. Such frightening numbers,” she said.
“I wouldn’t see my children until they were totally grown … what about my parents? That would just make me want to knock my head against the tiles and kill myself.”
She said the guards in the detention centre berated her for telling Australian embassy officials how she felt.
Interrogated, watched by guards 24/7
Cheng Lei, a presenter at the Chinese state-owned English language broadcaster CGTN , was taken into custody in August 2020.
“I was blindfolded and taken to a location which, when they had me sign documents, showed to be a certain address in Beijing,” she said.
Cheng described the place where she was held, in what the Chinese call Residential Surveillance at a Dedicated Location, or RSDL.
“It was just a beige cell with blue curtains and a single bed,” she said.
“You’re not allowed to have anything of your own. For example, my toiletries were brought in to me. The food was brought in to me by the guards.”
Cheng was watched 24 hours a day by two guards — one sitting next to her, one in front. She was not allowed to speak to them.
In RSDL, she was subjected to multiple interrogations as the authorities built a case against her.
“Intimidating. The first night was very long. The interrogations were more about trying to get you to spit out everything, everything that you know about everyone,” she said.
Her captors also made her write about herself. Cheng says she made a mistake by writing too much.
“That was very naive, because now thinking back, if I had written, ‘I am guilty, and I accept punishment,’ maybe I could have been spared more months of the RSDL,” she said.
“One never knows, but that’s what I suspect — those two lines are what they’re looking for.”
Before her arrest, the Australian journalist didn’t believe she would be a target of China’s state security apparatus.
“I always thought by being a business reporter, I was quite safe. And I was very blasé,” she said.
“[I] even boasted to other people that because I was bilingual, and I knew the culture, that I knew where the red lines were. Turns out, I don’t at all.”
‘A point where you have to numb yourself’
Later, in court, Cheng learnt that the authorities had been monitoring her since April 2020, four months before her arrest.
Months into her imprisonment, she was charged with illegally supplying state secrets to foreign organisations. She says that central to the allegations was her release to another journalist of an embargoed government report.
In order to protect associates still in China, Cheng did not want to elaborate, but said the detail was spelled out in her sentencing document.
Cheng was moved out of RSDL to a different detention facility after six months. There she shared her cell and bed with three other women.
As the months passed, her health and eyesight deteriorated.
She said she drew on reserves of mental discipline to keep her sanity.
“You reach a point where you have to numb yourself, and you have to think of the immediate now,” she said.
“For example, ‘I’m going to do … my exercises. And I’m now doing 50 squats. For each squat. I’m going to think of a German verb, or a Chinese poem.'”
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Cheng received letters from her children in Australia, but each time was forced to hand them back to the guards after reading them.
She told 7.30 through tears of the agony of dreaming of her children.
“The moment when you wake up, one minute they’re almost next to you and then you see the guard’s face …”
Back at home, but the fear hasn’t left
A few weeks ago, Cheng Lei entered a court in Beijing, where the judge smiled at her.
He read out her sentence: two years and 11 months, which meant she had already completed her prison time and she was to be deported.
Cheng said she has been welcomed home with warmth and kindness in Australia, but the fear from her experience has not yet left her.
“The reflex was always someone was going to tell me that I’m doing something wrong, and that there will be consequences,” she said.
“So even enjoying things, I feel a little bit fearful that I might be taken away. And bad things might happen again.”
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