Australian journalist Cheng Lei was arrested in China on 5th February 2021 following a previous six month detention service for espionage.
Ms. Cheng, TV presenter of Chinese state-own news channel CGTN, has been charged for illegally providing state secrets to foreign forces.
Chinese ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin confirmed her arrest at a press briefing on Monday 8th February but has been unable to give any further details.
The Australian Government has regularly raised serious concerns about Ms. Cheng’s detention at senior levels, with Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Marise Payne, saying, “we expect basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms.”
Wang responded that China is a country governed by law, saying “we hope the Australian authorities will respect China’s judicial sovereignty and stop interfering in China’s handling of cases.”
Cheng’s family has not been able to visit her since last August when she was detained by Chinese authorities on espionage without evidence at a designated location in China’s so-called “residential surveillance“, a special form of pre-trial detention in China’s Criminal Procedure Law.
Ms. Cheng is just one of the many journalists to have been arrested by Chinese authorities for spying or participating in anti-state crimes. In an annual global survey conducted by Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), China has been named as the world’s worst for imprisoning journalists for two years in a row now.
The CPJ report found that China arrested at least 47 journalists and several of them were charged for their coverage of the pandemic in 2020.
In August 2020, Ms. Cheng was first imprisoned for espionage and was then detained again in February 2021 for allegedly endangering national security.
In September, two Australian correspondents, Bill Birtles and Michael Smith fled China after they were questioned by the country’s state security ministry about Cheng’s case.
In December, Ms. Cheng’s close friend Haze Fan – working for the Bloomberg News bureau as a news assistant in Beijing – was detained by Chinese authorities for the same crime.
Globally, as of 1st December 2020, at least 274 journalists have been locked behind bars due to the nature of their work, surpassing the high of 272 in 2016.
According to the CPJ report, two-thirds of the imprisoned journalists were charged with anti-state crimes: thirty-six journalists, or 13%, of which were female.
Some of these women reported on female rights in Iran or Saudi Arabia and several were arrested covering protests in Belarus.
International NGO Human Rights Watch released a statement listing a dozen journalists and activists who were detained by China without any credible information on their accusations.
HRW is urging the Chinese authorities to stop arbitrary detentions for independent reporting and said, “they should drop all baseless charges and immediately and unconditionally release those wrongfully held.”
Grace Lin
Featured image courtesy of VJR21709 on Flickr. Image license can be found here. No changes were made to this image.
Grace Lin
Grace is a BJTC accredited journalist specialising in television journalism. She writes in both English and Mandarin Chinese with a focus on healthcare, human rights and social issues, especially within the Mandarin-speaking communities in the UK and abroad.