Australian journalist Cheng Lei gives first interview since China detention, feels ‘very fragile’

“Sometimes I feel like an invalid, like a newborn and very fragile and other times I feel like I could fly,” she said in the interview with the broadcaster on Tuesday.

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Detained Australian journalist Cheng Lei returns home after 3-year detention in China

Detained Australian journalist Cheng Lei returns home after 3-year detention in China

Cheng wept as she recalled her two children running towards her at the airport last Wednesday and her heartbreak at seeing her mother had aged and lost weight after shouldering the burden of raising them in her absence for three years.

“We just all screamed,” she said.

Cheng said she couldn’t divulge details about her case. She replied “yes” when the Sky interviewer said Cheng had shared a government briefing document before she went on-air and broke an embargo by a few minutes.

“In China that is a big sin, you have hurt the motherland and the state’s authority has been eroded because of you. What seems innocuous to us here … are not in China,” Cheng said.

“I am given to understand the ambit of state security is widening,” she added.

China’s State Security Ministry said last week Cheng had served a prison sentence after breaching a confidentiality agreement with her state media employer by providing state secrets to a foreign organisation through her mobile phone.

Recalling how she was first detained in August 2020, Cheng said someone senior from her work called her in, and she arrived to find 20 people there. “Someone stands up, shows his badge and says ‘you’re wanted’,” she recalled. She was escorted to her flat where it was searched all day.

In her first six months of detention she was isolated, and attempted to block negative thoughts by translating poems in her head. “Every dream was a nightmare because if it was a good dream, waking up was worse,” she said.

‘I miss my children’: Australian anchor held in China issues first statement

She later moved to a prison with cell mates, where the light was never turned off. Returning to Australia on the plane was the first time she had experienced darkness in three years, she said.

“Because of this whole ordeal I keep expecting people to drop out of the sky and arrest me,” she said, when asked how she was adjusting to life in Australia.

Cheng thanked the Australian government and public, and said Wong, who had reassured her family, had felt like “a friend who was trying to help me”.