JOURNALIST CHENG LEI IS MADE TO DISAPPEAR IN CHINA, AGAIN, BUT THIS TIME IT'S ONLY FOR THE CAMERAS!
A former television presenter for CGTN (the external arm of CCTV), Cheng Lei is an Australian citizen. She worked in Beijing from 2012 to 2020 and was then summarily detained in August 2020. She spent the next three years in China’s gulag of unlawful detention and imprisonment before being released in October 2023.
The charges against her have always been vague, in keeping with the whims and prerogatives of CCP’s opaque system of justice, but her detention is understood to have been precipitated by the minor slip of announcing an embargoed story a few minutes before the information was scheduled to be officially released.
For a full summary of the news program in which her televised “disappearance” took place, please consult the Follies of June 17, link below:
note: I wrote up the above summary before learning in detail how recently-released political prisoner Cheng Lei was made to “disappear” from ranks of working journalists covering the Li Qiang press conference. The following shots comprise the entirety of CCTV’s Xinwen Lianbo June 17 coverage of the press conference in question:
CCTV editors make it look smooth and easy but there was trouble brewing in the back of the room as agents of the Chinese government attempted to interfere with the work of a working journalist at a press conference in Australia.
The bit of blue jacket on the right hand side of the second row behind an array of Chinese officials is as much of a glimpse of the “banned from the airwaves” Cheng Lei as the Chinese domestic viewer is likely to get.
What soon became apparent on Twitter and other social media is that Chinese officials were deliberately blocking Cheng Lei from the wide sweep of the camera, and what’s more, perhaps trying to intimidate her on Australian soil, or at clumsily attempting to impress on her that it would be best if she not make trouble. After all, she’s been tainted by unjust incarceration, and that makes her slightly dangerous.
Indeed, it’s not beyond the imagination of Chinese officialdom that being slapped with spurious charges and kept in a China prison might cause a person to engage in what they would term as “anti-China behavior.”
Cheng Lei, contrary to expectations, didn’t scream out or make a scene, in fact she appeared to be even-keeled throughout, even smiling at times. That she showed no animosity and took the incident in stride is to her immense credit. But it also accentuates the clumsiness of the attempt to physically block her, in a series of move that were as pathetic and paranoid as they were petty.
The two Chinese officials at the press conference look innocuous enough at first glance, but the video tells another story;
https://x.com/KnottMatthew/status/1802569393983177170
https://x.com/fryan/status/1802569391600734546/video/1
Here, in Cheng Lei’s own words, a summary of what happened on the sidelines.
And this from Will Glasgow at the Australian:
I feel a great deal of sympathy (and admiration and respect) for Cheng Lei.
To me she is not just a fellow journalist who has been subject to unfair treatment by an authoritarian state, but a kindred spirit who made a number of appearances on CCTV and ran into trouble for crossing little red lines.
Cheng Lei and I never overlapped in the studio, as best as I can determine, but I think we were both committed to bringing dialogue and debate to Chinese TV inasmuch as such a thing is possible. I was on air intermittently as a guest commentator between 2001 and 2012 while she worked regularly at CCTV from 2012 to 2020.
Judging from what I’ve read about her, we both had the inclination to push boundaries in the interests of journalism, and got push back for doing it. The main difference being things got much stricter under Xi than they had been for me during the relatively freewheeling Hu Jintao years. I got a reprimand and was eventually banned from going on air. She got detention and prison.
My introduction to CCTV came as a consultant on best journalistic practices, while in China as a Knight Journalism Fellow. I saw so much time and effort wasted on censoring recorded programs before allowing them on air and pushed for a move to live talk shows. “Let the guests talk freely, the Great Wall won’t come falling down.”
I was subsequently invited on as a guest in one of the inaugural live sessions for a show called Dialogue, and I made regular appearances after that when I was in country. In the studio chats and interviews I gingerly breached taboo topics, commenting (however fleetingly) on topics such as the Tiananmen demonstrations (“I was there! It was a beautiful thing, marching together in peace!” ) I criticized Bo Xilai when he was at the height of his powers, and later had the odd experience of visiting Yanan with a TV crew in between back-to-back visits by Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping.
My willingness to talk of dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, both of whom I interviewed in China in 1994 after release from prison (for American TV) was not as troubling to the producers as my suggestion that the Dalai Lama should be invited into the studio to speak for himself instead of being attacked from afar.
Over time, there were complaints from the Foreign Ministry and other sources.
A retired PLA general once had the misfortune to share the airwaves with me for a discussion about the politics of the South China Sea. I said things he didn’t like and he angrily insisted that I be taken off the program or the program be taken off the air. The live program concluded in a huff, and the subsequent scheduled rebroadcasts were canceled.
One of my last appearances on CCTV was on a 2011 special about Yanan, “Cradle of Revolution” in which I criticized Mao for dictatorial behavior while being interviewed in Yanan Date Garden, close to the cave where Mao famously took shelter. The freewheeling interview took place in the Date Garden pavilion seen in the image below.
The Yanan program was broadcast at least once, but was then taken off the air without the usual repeats and recycling. The Yanan program was redone, inexplicably, a few months later with a different cast and crew and, as I couldn’t help but notice, a more cooperative foreign guest.
Ouch!
It was never convincingly explained to me why the show was redone, but I have not been able to access a copy of the original show since. It is my theory, perhaps a rather fanciful one, that any show with a foreigner throwing shade on the holy ground of Yanan did not sit well with Xi Jinping, and his people ordered it redone, but who knows? I did visit the party school when Xi was in charge there, but the only interviews we conducted were with professors and I didn’t do anything scandalous as best I can recall.
The erasure and remake of the Yanan show was never explained, but it happened during the red anthem craze just as Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping were circling one another, each arranging visits to the red holy land of Yanan within the same short time period.
After the Yanan escapade, I was watched like a hawk whenever I stepped foot on the CCTV premises, and my ability to conduct research there was wholly curtailed. My final broadcasts as an “honored guest” on CCTV were, not surprisingly, on anodyne topics such as cultural significance of Chinese New Year.