Australian journalist Cheng Lei has written a memoir and produced a play that transform the 1,154 days she spent in Chinese custody into a public record of the harsh conditions inside the country’s secretive prison system and the tactics used to extract confessions. The play, “1154 Days,” premieres in Melbourne on May 28, offering audiences what Cheng describes as a raw, emotional accounting of isolation, enforced silence, and the slow process of rebuilding a shattered identity.
Cheng, 50, a Chinese‑born Australian who migrated at age 10, was a well‑known bilingual television anchor for China’s state broadcaster CCTV until August 2020, when a Beijing State Security Bureau official told her she was being investigated for “suspicion of endangering state security.” She was blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location. She would not be deported until October 2023.
The trigger for her arrest, she contends, was diplomatic. Four days before the investigation began, Australia’s then‑Foreign Minister Marise Payne had called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the COVID‑19 pandemic — a demand that infuriated Beijing. “Why me? Why that time? All these questions I’m still asking,” Cheng told the Associated Press during rehearsals for the play. “I believe I was a victim of hostage diplomacy.”
Her formal conviction turned on a documentary mishap. In May 2020, Cheng broke a seven‑minute embargo on then‑Premier Li Keqiang’s annual economic report to the National People’s Congress — an address that, for the first time in years, omitted a growth target. She says she was unaware of the embargo. A Beijing court later convicted her of “illegally providing state secrets abroad” and sentenced her to two years and 11 months in prison, a term she had almost served by the time the sentence was handed down.
The early phase of her detention was the most brutal. She spent six months under what China calls “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location,” or RSDL — a regime of near‑total isolation, constant surveillance, enforced silence, and extreme restrictions on movement. “Authorities focus from the outset on breaking prisoners to gain guilty pleas,” Cheng said. Despite enduring what she calls “stultifying monotony” during those months, she received credit toward her sentence for only three of the six.
Her case unfolded against a backdrop of spiraling Australia‑China tensions. A month before her arrest, Canberra had warned its citizens they risked “arbitrary detention” in China. Within weeks of Cheng’s apprehension, the last Australian journalists working for Australian media — the Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith and the Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s Bill Birtles — left the country. Both were separately interviewed by police about Cheng before being permitted to depart.
The conservative Australian government that had drawn Beijing’s ire was replaced in May 2022 by the current center‑left Labor Party government, after which trade blockades on Australian wine, coal, barley and lobsters began to ease. But high‑level meetings with Chinese officials have continued to raise the case of another Australian, democracy blogger Yang Hengjun, who was given a suspended death sentence in 2024 after a Beijing court convicted him of espionage.
Now 60 and in deteriorating health, Yang could learn within weeks whether his penalty will be commuted to life in prison. Cheng feels a pressing responsibility to speak for him and others who remain voiceless inside China’s justice system. “They would want this story to be told because they don’t have a voice,” she said. “And for the people who are too scared to talk because their families are hostages in China, this is for them too.”
In the years since her deportation, Cheng has rebuilt her life with an almost performative determination. She works as a TV news presenter and columnist for Sky News Australia in Melbourne, where she lives with her daughter Ava, 17, and son Alex, 15. (Both children had been visiting family in Melbourne when China sealed its borders in early 2020, months before her arrest.) She has also taken up stand‑up comedy, performing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s RAW Competition in February. “If you can’t joke about incarceration, then you have no sense of humor,” she told the Australian Financial Review last year. “Humor got me through much of it and brightened the cell for me and my cellmates.”
The play, which its publicist says “reveals how the mind adapts, resists and even creates under pressure,” draws on Cheng’s own notes and memories. “It’s about how it feels to have everything taken away from you,” she explained. “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.”
Cheng hopes the production will give Western audiences a visceral sense of the gap between Beijing’s claims to be a just, rule‑of‑law society and the reality she and others have experienced. “I think 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,” she said. “For me, it’s a fuller appreciation of life and much more adventurousness and also a serene sort of quiet fearlessness.”