Many years ago, I worked with a Chinese-born colleague. Eventually, he moved on to a high-paying job with an Australian company based in mainland China. Notably, before he moved back, he took out Australian citizenship. “Hedging your bets?” I joked.
As it turns out, it probably wouldn’t do him much good, anyway.
China has demonstrated in no uncertain terms that no one, but no one, is beyond the reach of its secret police. From China’s most famous actress to its richest businessman, China has made it clear that anyone can and will be “disappeared” by the Communist Party. Including foreign citizens.
Such as Australian journalist Chang Lei.
The single mother of two children — one of the highest-profile Australians living in China — had been nabbed by secret police in Beijing. That was August 13 — a year ago, this Friday.
Her co-workers in the headquarters of the China Global Television Network, China’s English-language state broadcaster, only found out when someone on the Beijing breaking news desk saw a report in international media.
The arrest was made in complete secrecy. None of her colleagues were informed by station management; but they had reason to suspect something was up.
Eight days earlier, management had made them sign a strange legal document, called a nondisclosure undertaking.
“Everyone — all the foreign staff — were given one to sign,” Tadek Markowski tells The Australian.
Markowski quit within weeks and returned to Australia. Even foreign staff outside China are getting out.
Christine Schiffner left her job as the director of news gathering at CGTN’s Washington DC bureau weeks before Cheng was detained. Schiffner, who previously worked for Germany’s public broadcaster, ARD, said the network’s coverage of Xinjiang made her increasingly uncomfortable.
“It was just a line I couldn’t cross,” she tells The Australian in her first interview since leaving the state broadcaster.
The interference ramped up in her last six months after a new Chinese manager was installed to oversee the American operations.
As the coronavirus spread around the world, things only got worse. “Beijing wanted us to follow up on these stories and find these people to prove that the virus did not originate in Wuhan but originated somewhere else,” says Schiffner.
Cheng is just one person caught up in a wave of silent Terror spreading across – and beyond – China under Xi Jinping. It has only intensified in the wake of the Wuhan virus.
A Facebook diary entry Cheng posted in February, during the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, suggests her news sense was bumping into the tightening state media strictures.
“Last night I had dinner with my friend Haze who’s also in TV, we are both lobbying our bosses to let us go to Wuhan to report, and not succeeding,” she wrote. By December that friend — Haze Fan, a Chinese journalist working at Bloomberg — had been detained as well on “suspicion of endangering national security”.
Whatever is happening to Cheng – she has not been allowed to speak to her children since her arrest, and consular access is heavily controlled – it’s certainly no summer camp.
For the first six months after her arrest, the Australian was held in what China’s authorities euphemistically call “residential surveillance at a designated location” in a secret facility in Beijing.
That involved sleep deprivation, intimidation by multiple interrogators and other abuse, as China’s Ministry of State Security tried to gain evidence to build a case against her[…]
Australian diplomats, including ambassador Graham Fletcher, have been given access to monthly consular meetings over video. The summaries are nightmarish. April’s visit began with Cheng being brought into the communication room blindfolded, masked and handcuffed, accompanied by four guards.
In a truly communistic irony, Cheng is the originator of CGTN’s official slogan, “See the difference”.
Cheng’s videos and profile page were purged from CGTN’s websites in the days after her sudden disappearance. But “See the difference” remains the network’s slogan, emblazoned around its Beijing headquarters and still running across the channel.
The Australian
I guess we can indeed see the difference: who’s still there, dutifully reading CCP propaganda, and who’s disappeared.
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