CHINA
10 August 2025

Surviving China’s secret prisons
Cheng Lei's book documents the horrors of China's secret prisons.
Hostage diplomacy and arbitrary detention in secret prisons are among the most heinous facets of the Chinese party state’s governance. In Cheng Lei: A Memoir of Freedom, an Australian journalist of Chinese extraction tells her story of harrowing detention of more than three years, and offers a uniquely insightful and detailed look into the policies and practices of authoritarian China.
Cheng was born in China and migrated to Australia in 1985 at the age of 10 with her family. She became an Australian citizen in 2003. At the time of her detention by Chinese authorities in September 2020, she had served as a prominent news anchor for Chinese state-owned English-language news channel China Global Television Network in Beijing since 2012. She had previously worked for nine years as CNBC’s China correspondent.
Cheng’s fresh and vibrant writing style is immediately evident as she recounts her arrest. She was called from home to her office for an urgent meeting. But when she arrived, ‘perhaps twenty people were sitting around a twelve-metre-long table’.
One of them announced, ‘I am informing you on behalf of the Beijing State Security Bureau that you are being investigated for supplying state secrets to foreign organisations.’ She allegedly broke an embargo by seven minutes. Her writing also has a distinctly engaging Australian style, such as when she writes ‘I stood there like a stunned mullet’.
She was initially held under ‘residential surveillance’, which allows the Chinese officials and authorities to keep detainees in secret custody for up to six months without charge, and deny visits by family members or lawyers. She was then transferred to a prison for the remainder of her detention, which amounted to 1,065 days overall. She was released in October 2023 following intense diplomatic efforts by the Australian government.
The residential surveillance phase involved solitary confinement while the Chinese authorities worked to mount a case against her. She had to sit on the edge of her bed for the whole day while two people stared at her from a distance of 40 centimetres (‘body-odour sharing distance’). They followed and watched her visits to the toilet and shower. She was prohibited from talking to them, which she believes also amounted to torture for them.
While describing the inhumane conditions of her confinement, Cheng’s own humanity shines through in the text. On one occasion, she could see that one of her guards was dying to go to the toilet but was not allowed to during the four-hour shift. Cheng could only sympathise as the guard defecated in her pants. She later heard the guard say that her pay was docked because of this incident. She reports that these poor guards are technical school graduates in their 20s who earn a mere 3,000 yuan a month for doing this backbreaking work.
After solitary confinement, Cheng was shifted to ‘detention’, just 100 metres down the road. She was hungering for human contact, and indeed shared a bed and room with four cell mates. But they only knew each other by numbers (Cheng was 21003, or 03 for short) and were prohibited from discussing their cases. One punishment for misbehaviour was having to write ‘self-bashing essays’. But ingenuity could not be totally repressed as Cheng and her cell mates communicated with people in the next cell by tapping on the wall in a kind of Chinese Morse code.
While they were allowed some physical exercise, it was in a ‘concrete box’. Ministry of State Security staff would nevertheless insist to detainees that they had it good. Public Security Bureau prisons are much tougher. Highlights of Cheng’s detention were monthly 30-minute video conferences with Australian Embassy staff, letters from family and reading some 300 books.
Cheng’s conditions began to improve following the Australian Labor Party’s election victory in 2022, under the leadership of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. She believes that her detention was instigated by the previous government’s call for an independent, international enquiry into the origins of Covid-19, something which incensed the Chinese government.
For its part, the Chinese government was eventually looking for a way to restore its image in the West, starting with Australia. Australia’s change of government in 2022, followed by a meeting between Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping at an APEC leaders’ meeting in November 2022 provided an opportunity to work toward the release of Cheng.
After all her suffering, Cheng calls for a balanced approach to dealing with China. She hopes readers ‘can make distinctions between China and Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party’. She also wants us to ‘appreciate Chinese people’s industriousness and ingenuity, to enjoy the deep rich culture but also be unafraid to call out the repression and torture taking place in unlit corners of China’.
Cheng was born in China and migrated to Australia in 1985 at the age of 10 with her family. She became an Australian citizen in 2003. At the time of her detention by Chinese authorities in September 2020, she had served as a prominent news anchor for Chinese state-owned English-language news channel China Global Television Network in Beijing since 2012. She had previously worked for nine years as CNBC’s China correspondent.
Cheng’s fresh and vibrant writing style is immediately evident as she recounts her arrest. She was called from home to her office for an urgent meeting. But when she arrived, ‘perhaps twenty people were sitting around a twelve-metre-long table’.
One of them announced, ‘I am informing you on behalf of the Beijing State Security Bureau that you are being investigated for supplying state secrets to foreign organisations.’ She allegedly broke an embargo by seven minutes. Her writing also has a distinctly engaging Australian style, such as when she writes ‘I stood there like a stunned mullet’.
She was initially held under ‘residential surveillance’, which allows the Chinese officials and authorities to keep detainees in secret custody for up to six months without charge, and deny visits by family members or lawyers. She was then transferred to a prison for the remainder of her detention, which amounted to 1,065 days overall. She was released in October 2023 following intense diplomatic efforts by the Australian government.
The residential surveillance phase involved solitary confinement while the Chinese authorities worked to mount a case against her. She had to sit on the edge of her bed for the whole day while two people stared at her from a distance of 40 centimetres (‘body-odour sharing distance’). They followed and watched her visits to the toilet and shower. She was prohibited from talking to them, which she believes also amounted to torture for them.
While describing the inhumane conditions of her confinement, Cheng’s own humanity shines through in the text. On one occasion, she could see that one of her guards was dying to go to the toilet but was not allowed to during the four-hour shift. Cheng could only sympathise as the guard defecated in her pants. She later heard the guard say that her pay was docked because of this incident. She reports that these poor guards are technical school graduates in their 20s who earn a mere 3,000 yuan a month for doing this backbreaking work.
After solitary confinement, Cheng was shifted to ‘detention’, just 100 metres down the road. She was hungering for human contact, and indeed shared a bed and room with four cell mates. But they only knew each other by numbers (Cheng was 21003, or 03 for short) and were prohibited from discussing their cases. One punishment for misbehaviour was having to write ‘self-bashing essays’. But ingenuity could not be totally repressed as Cheng and her cell mates communicated with people in the next cell by tapping on the wall in a kind of Chinese Morse code.
While they were allowed some physical exercise, it was in a ‘concrete box’. Ministry of State Security staff would nevertheless insist to detainees that they had it good. Public Security Bureau prisons are much tougher. Highlights of Cheng’s detention were monthly 30-minute video conferences with Australian Embassy staff, letters from family and reading some 300 books.
Cheng’s conditions began to improve following the Australian Labor Party’s election victory in 2022, under the leadership of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. She believes that her detention was instigated by the previous government’s call for an independent, international enquiry into the origins of Covid-19, something which incensed the Chinese government.
For its part, the Chinese government was eventually looking for a way to restore its image in the West, starting with Australia. Australia’s change of government in 2022, followed by a meeting between Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping at an APEC leaders’ meeting in November 2022 provided an opportunity to work toward the release of Cheng.
After all her suffering, Cheng calls for a balanced approach to dealing with China. She hopes readers ‘can make distinctions between China and Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party’. She also wants us to ‘appreciate Chinese people’s industriousness and ingenuity, to enjoy the deep rich culture but also be unafraid to call out the repression and torture taking place in unlit corners of China’.