“Luminous pulse” shines through Cheng Lei’s story

A “gripping and unexpectedly revealing” work written and performed by journalist Cheng Lei that is premiering at Arts House this month is not just about retelling the suffering of her three-year detention in China, Lei says, but “explor[ing] something universal”.

Cheng Lei was a glamorous TV presenter on state-owned Chinese Central Television’s English language channel Global Business show in August 2020 when she was summoned to a meeting with her boss.

Arriving at the meeting room on the 37th floor of the US$900 million CCTV building in Beijing where she worked she was met by security officers who told her she was under investigation for supplying state secrets to foreign organisations and took her into custody.

Within a few hours she was blindfolded and taken to a secret location.

A few months earlier Australia’s foreign minister and prime minister had infuriated the Chinese government by calling for an independent investigation into the source of COVID-19, a call that triggered a dramatic deterioration in the relationship between the two countries.

It would be more than three years before Lei, who has described herself as “a human pawn”, would see her children, family and the outside world again.

For the first six months of her detention, Lei was held under a system known as Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location.

Used by the Chinese Communist Party against individuals accused of endangering state security, RSDL has been condemned by human rights experts as a kind of enforced disappearance where detainees may be tortured.

It is defined by isolation, surveillance and silence.

For Lei it meant sitting in a small room with a guard close beside her on either side and being unable to talk or even move without permission for 13 hours a day.

Her performance, 1154 Days, provides “a rare and vivid window” into the largely hidden world of the RSDL system, its producers say.

Directed by Emma Valente and Clyde White, the work uses multi-camera projection combined with live performance to put the audience inside the “shifting worlds” of “a Beijing apartment where life suddenly fractures, the stark, controlled space of RSDL and a return to Melbourne, where freedom brings its own complexities”.

Now a journalist at Sky News, Lei, who was released in October 2023 after sustained campaigning and a change of government in Australia, has published a memoir, appeared in documentaries and given many interviews about her experience.

But she continues to process and
explore it.

According to her artist statement on 1154 Days, it demonstrates the power of the mind, finds dark humour in the absurdity of China’s “opaque justice system” and “celebrates human connection – the dazzling creativity that arises from our instinct to reach out and comfort one another” with small acts that “defied the machinery of dehumanisation”.

It also asks, “urgent questions about what we value in a society” and is “a meditation on the meaning of freedom”.

The work, which will have its world premiere at Arts House at the end of May, was also intended to be performed at Melbourne’s RISING, which opens on May 27, although according to The Australian, there was no formal agreement in place when it was axed by the festival in February.

In a letter to the RISING chair, Lei and director Emma Valente described the cancellation of the work, which had been in development with the festival for more than a year, as an act of political censorship.

The Australian reported the work was understood to have been dropped on the basis of a “risk and audit report” conducted by the festival, while a RISING spokesperson said the decision had been made as a result of budget constraints.

Fellow former detainee Dr Kylie Moore Gilbert wrote on social media that Lei had “poured her heart and soul into staging a very public and challenging conversation with a live audience on what happened, and what was done to her”.

Lei's voice is vital, and this play is more urgent than ever,” she wrote on Twitter.

“Shame on RISING festival for cancelling Lei!”

According to Lei the performance is “ultimately … a tribute to all who are punished for thought, speech, and truth [which] weav[es] tragedy with comic relief to reveal the luminous pulse of humanity that no system can fully crush".

1154 Days opens at the Arts House on May 28 and runs until May 31. •