After three years in detention, Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who worked for the international Chinese state television channel CGTN, was finally reunited with her family in Melbourne on Wednesday, October 11. Cheng, an Australian citizen of Chinese origin, had been accused of "communicating state secrets" to an unspecified foreign organization. The lack of transparency led many to suggest a political motivation behind her arrest in August 2020, which, indeed, coincided with a particularly tense period in China-Australia relations. While Beijing announced that she had served her sentence, never made public, her release comes at a time of warming relations with Canberra.
Cheng, 48, was welcomed on arrival by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, before being reunited with her two children. "Her return brings an end to a very difficult few years for Ms. Cheng and her family,” Albanese told reporters on Wednesday, adding that the journalist had reunited with her two children. Cheng had been tried in March, behind closed doors, but the court postponed her sentence. Even Australia's ambassador to Beijing was denied access to the hearing.
On Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Cheng had been sentenced to two years and 11 months in prison. "After serving her sentence, Cheng Lei was deported by the Beijing State Security Bureau in accordance with the law," said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the ministry.
Cheng's arrest coincided with a low point in relations between China and Australia, which is home to a large ethnic Chinese community. Tensions started to flare up in 2017, when Australia passed a law condemning foreign interference, following several scandals involving Chinese influence operations. These tensions culminated in 2020 when Scott Morrison's conservative government called for an independent inquiry into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. China, which at the time was fighting back with its own information war, disseminating false information about a possible American origin of the virus, expressed its anger and adopted several retaliatory measures, imposing tariffs and investigations restricting the import of Australian coal, beef, barley and wine.
The detention of Cheng, who was initially placed under "house arrest at a designated location," a euphemism for six months under police custody without visits or lawyers, prompted accusations that Beijing was engaging in "hostage diplomacy." A year earlier, in January 2019, Chinese-Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun was also arrested and charged with espionage. Albanese said his administration was continuing to negotiate for his release. In 2018, two Canadian citizens were arrested, a few days after Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's CFO and daughter of the Chinese telecommunications giant's founder, had been arrested in Canada.
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