Australian journalist Cheng Lei served a prison sentence of two years and 11 months for “illegally providing state secrets to overseas parties” before being deported from China on October 11, 2023.
On August 14, 2020, Chinese authorities detained Cheng, a China-born Australian citizen and business news anchor for the state-run broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN), and notified the Australian government, according to news reports and a statement from Australia’s Foreign Ministry.
After her detention, CGTN removed Cheng’s profile from its webpage and took down many of her stories, according to those news reports.
On September 8, 2020, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that Cheng was under investigation for “criminal activity endangering China’s national security,” according to news reports. That same month, Australian journalists Bill Birtles and Mike Smith fled China after state security officials questioned them about Cheng’s case.
An Australian government statement in February 2021 said that Cheng had been formally arrested on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas. In August 2022, another statement said that Cheng had been secretly tried in Beijing on March 31, but had not been informed of the verdict.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on October 11, 2023, that Cheng had arrived home after more than three years in detention. On the same day, China’s Ministry of State Security confirmed for the first time that Cheng had been found guilty by the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court of “illegally providing state secrets to overseas parties.”
In a video statement made for CPJ in November 2025, Cheng described the “dehumanizing” and “isolating” conditions of her detention. In her first six months, she was held in Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), which United Nations experts have deemed a form of enforced disappearance that is not compatible with international human rights law.
Cheng said she was held in a padded cell with the lights always on and curtains closed. For 13 hours a day, she was made to sit on the edge of a hard bed and was watched constantly by teams of two guards positioned close by.
After she was moved to detention, she said she was held with three other inmates in a 10-by-23-foot cell (3-by-7-meters) that was surveilled by five cameras. When the detainees laughed, guards would buzz through an intercom to reprimand them, she said.
In total, Cheng was detained for three years and two months, during which she saw only about 10 hours of sunlight each year, had one 30-minute phone call with her family, and did not see a single plant, she told CPJ. She had monthly 30-minute consular visits.
In September 2022, CPJ emailed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Council seeking new information on Cheng’s case, but did not receive any response.