Lei Cheng

I'm very energized by the reception.

And it's very empowering to have lost my voice, my identity, lost everything for so long.

I love TED.

And I love our lineup of awesome speakers who all have years of experience on their subjects.

My talk is about what I didn't have for a long time.

And as Claire told you, I received free accommodation from the Chinese government for over three years for so-called leaking state secrets overseas at the worst time for Australia-China relations.

And the first phase was called RSDL, Chinese spelling for hell.

Then in detention, the sort that makes jail seem like Ibiza,

And it was through that ordeal, call it the wonder diet, that I realized freedom is wasted on the free.

Let me explain.

You can be paralyzed by choice.

You can't comprehend the vastness or the preciousness.

So how do you make freedom count when you're lucky enough to have it?

To start, what it felt like to be not free.

and then to reclaim a lot of that, and in fact, with the TED audience, to magnify not just my voice, but that of others wrongfully incarcerated in China and in other countries, and to tell people that

even while China seduces with sophistication of technology and seemingly stable prosperity, that there are these dark corners in which repression and torture take place.

And I would love for people to take a nuanced approach to my story as opposed to, oh my God, that is so awful.

China is evil.

Don't go to China, bash the nearest Chinese person you see.

That would be the

The exact opposite of what I want to see.

I want people to understand that at the same time we call that abuse out, we can still appreciate Chinese culture and Chinese industriousness and creativity.

Would you ever go to China again?

It's a bit like asking a domestic violence victim whether I'd go sleep with the husband who kidnapped me for three years again.

But my stock answer to this, this is the most asked question.

And to be honest, I used to find it a bit strange why people ask it.

But yes, if I felt safe enough.

And yes, if I felt welcome enough.

And right now, they're still making up lies about me on the Chinese internet.

And safety-wise, certainly not.

Because what I'm saying today is going to be held as a breach of espionage law.

I'd always liked writing as a lonely, only child and fugly teenager.

It was my escape, my therapy.

And I always liked to know what was happening in the world and to tell other people about it.

But I was actually five years as a bored person.

unfulfilled accountant before I made the brave switch to journalism.

Oh, wow.

Out of parental pressure, I studied commerce and became an accountant, but I hated what I was doing and wanted to use my bilingual skills.

I'd always enjoyed being that medium between two worlds.

And when I saw a job for a business analyst in eastern China,

And this was back in year 2000 when China had just joined the WTO and it really wanted to globalize.

I jumped at the chance.

And once there, I saw firsthand how state-owned companies were operated, that is, with very little accountability and control.

transparency.

And then I saw another opportunity at then what was known as CCTV9, which was the English channel of the state broadcaster and got my start there.

But a year and a half later was approached by CNBC to become their China correspondent.

So that was how I got into TV journalism.

Amazing.

That being said, growing up with first-generation immigrant parents in Australia, I'd always known that in China they had taken away a lot of freedoms for years.

Your parents, they came up during the Cultural Revolution, I assume?

Even then, I saw the crackdown that came in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

And I'd always known that China wanted to keep freedom of speech and protest and all that because it wanted to control the people.

And the propaganda is that it wants a stable government.

society that's good for everyone but it's also very condescending and patriarchal to say that we know what's good for everyone and when i went back to china to work i thought i was helping with the change to liberalization yeah that telling what was happening in china to a global audience and vice versa was helping everyone understand each other yeah

I guess, as I alluded to in the talk, I marvel at every little freedom that we have because for three years and two months, it was all brutally taken away from me.

So I see, like when I lost my mobile phone in the Uber about two months after I was released, after the initial panic, I had such a

Wonderful thought.

At least I have a phone to lose now.

Yeah.

So what's annoying, what's frustrating is a privilege.

When we die, we won't have any of this pain.

Yeah.

So to embrace pain, change, discomfort, to have that inner zen at all times.

Like right now, if...

there was a natural disaster or if there was war, I think I could still draw on that terrible experience and be able to create, be able to help others and feel free.

I think that's a fraught concept and it can be abused in so many ways.

I prefer to think of these grand ideas as concrete little steps that we can all practice day to day.

Because some of the best freedom fighters in the world can suddenly turn into dictators once they gain power.

And that's because they know how to shut down all the other freedom fighters.

And for me, it's more important to respect others' thoughts, opinions, as long as they don't incite hate.

And it's more important for me to show kindness, even with people who may try to hurt me.

Well, they're so easily offended.

If you say one thing or 10 things, it doesn't really matter.

So you're just like, oh, let her rip.

And the other thing is, if...

I am to be afraid of and to be shut down.

That is actually a compliment.

It means that... You're paying attention.

Yes, and that I am influencing people.

I think we should all keep top of mind the value and cost of freedom.

Sometimes it's very easy to

To see glossy facades of countries like China.

But if you don't realize the cost of that glossiness.

Yeah.

As I know, a lot of influencers saying, oh, look at China.

It's great.

And all of that is true.

But if you only show that part of China, it's wrong.

I think we do.

And in a way, the more choice you have, the less freedom.

Ooh, say more.

Yeah, say more about this.

So if you're paralyzed by choice or if you are constricted by this array of availability, then you're not really thinking for yourself.

you're just a slave to more masters.

So always think about why am I thinking and feeling this way?

Is this me?

And too many choices stop that conversation from happening.

Right.

Certainly not polarizing views.

I wish more centrists could be braver.

And I wish media organizations didn't have to make the tough choice between survival and clickbait.

This is a subject that many journalists in Australia and other countries talk about with increasing sense of depression.

Right.

Because it is happening everywhere and where we might, but we aren't quite seeing media savviness take place in our consumers and whether they then follow with their wallets and attention is another thing.

But we have to keep at it.

One accurate and...

nuanced article at a time and through meeting and fostering trust between us and our readers, viewers, anyone we meet.

I think they should do as much as possible because nobody is telling them not to, to think as far out as they can because they're not in my parents' era during the Cultural Revolution, during which they had to report to the great leader every day their thoughts and have their diaries raided.

So we have all these freedoms that we don't exercise.

And please don't wait until you're sitting in a prison cell like I was or on your deathbed and not even to know what you missed.

That would be a tragedy greater than any other.

I think they tend to be fairly international, the major ones.

But in terms of the people you find there, you'll probably find some local flavors.

Oh, yes.

We're making it up as we go.

Yeah.

Love the creative process.

From someone who was deprived of any choice for a long time, I tend to just have, just love everything.

A day filled with

food and cooking, going to a produce market, playing some soccer, making up skits with my children, writing and listening to all sorts of music and hugs and kisses.

Also, if I just said sex, you might not make it to the final cut.

I'm worried about my kids not learning how to communicate well.

interpersonally.

But I'm also hopeful that they might be a new generation of thinkers and communicators and innovators that we can't imagine right now.

Flowers.

And spring in Vancouver, my God, with all that rain, your flowers are just absolutely gorgeous.

And at TED, every table centerpiece is magnificent.

So lovely.

And I had no plants for over three years, so.

I look at them all the time and touch them.

My talk is about what I didn't have for a long time.

I received free accommodation from the Chinese government for over three years for so-called leaking state secrets overseas at the worst time for Australia-China relations.

And the first phase was called RSDL, Chinese spelling for hell.

Then in detention, the sort that makes jail seem like Ibiza,

And it was through that ordeal, called the wonder diet, that I realized freedom is wasted on the free.

Let me explain.

When you only have a few dollars, you know how to spend it.

When you win the lottery, it's easy to squander and hard to get your priorities right.

Same with freedom.

You can be paralyzed by choice.

You can't comprehend the vastness or the preciousness.

So how do you make freedom count when you're lucky enough to have it?

To start, what it felt like to be not free.

In RSDL, I had two guards glued to me front and side at all times.

I was made to sit for 13 hours straight each day.

I had to request permission to make the smallest movement.

And you know what I wanted to do the most?

I wanted to run.

And usually I hate running.

I couldn't talk, which to me is major torture.

I wanted to talk to anyone.

But in real life, I have sometimes worn ear pods to shut people out.

And I would have done anything to learn.

except when I was outside, I wasted the chance.

I was too busy.

Then I moved to detention.

I had three cellmates, and that already felt like freedom paradise.

Nobody in the cell regrets things like money or assets, but we were kicking ourselves over the travel we didn't do, the love we didn't show, the risks we didn't take.

Imprisonment is like a mini-death.

It's a taste of the real thing.

It hit us that one day we'll lose the chance to do everything, even the stuff we hate now.

So now I do things I want immediately.

Another way to value freedom is to be super aware of the forms of prison.

My son asked me, if a kid goes to the same nursery, elementary, high school, is that a 13-year sentence?

It got me thinking about life as a death sentence and the prisons we put ourselves in.

Property, objects can tie us down.

Relationships can be shackles too.

And we sometimes give up our civil liberties in exchange for a neat society.

But the maximum security prison is our mind, our fears and conventions and biases.

And that's why the officers in detention, who are so bound by doctrine, couldn't understand that we could learn with delight and make fun behind bars.

I talk about imprisonment.

But in fact, everyone here, we've all had some loss of physical freedom.

COVID lockdowns.

We've all been sick in bed.

But when we lose physical freedom, it's an opportunity to find freedom within.

And that's how I could, when I was blindfolded and handcuffed, think myself to infinity.

through imagination, knowledge, and a BTFI serenity.

Beyond the fuck it.

It means no matter how bad things get, riding out the worst part, which for me had been wanting to bash my head open against the tiles to shut off the mental anguish.

It had been being stripped naked in a cage.

So the ultimate state of being is to be serene.

But you can't get there until you've exhausted the other extreme, anxiety, pain, despair.

And now I'm giving a TED Talk.

Thank you.

And when we are serene, we can choose kindness.

When those guards watched me,

at all times.

I would still say good morning to them.

I didn't hold it against them when they enforced the strict rules, because I saw that they suffered too.

During the shifts, they couldn't talk, drink water or even go to the toilet.

They had to watch me shit, shower and sleep.

Later in detention, I would still show courtesy to the officers, even when they were rude.

even when they encouraged us to snitch.

I still chose to forgive my cellmates and empathize.

If I become vengeful and petty, then they've taken away more from me.

I was in a cell for a while with a terrible bully.

She made my life hell.

but once called for a midnight interrogation.

She was so scared, she asked if she could hold my hand.

I hugged her and comforted her.

Once you realize that pain is the ultimate commonality, you can also give kindness as the universal gift.

Some of the most precious gifts I've received were in detention, even though we had close to nothing.

Music.

A cellmate wrote a song in her head in solitary and sang it for me on my birthday.

No Spotify or chat GPT or even notepad from her head to our ears.

Poetry, an acrostic poem, knocked via the adjacent cell's walls through an alphabetical code.

It took over 400 knocks and precise counting to receive that message.

But you know what?

With each knock, I could feel the power of friendship transcend those thick walls.

Of course, we were punished, but it was worth it.

Crafts that we made in secrecy that were destroyed once seen because it was against the rules.

But the objects were nothing compared to how we felt in making and giving those gifts.

So you see, there can be endless creativity even within a world of constraints.

And maybe by having so much, we lose the ability to create something out of nothing.

I'm not promoting detention, but like athletes training at high altitude, setting some constraints may expand our minds.

We can also expand our appreciation of life through some deprivation, because that recalibrates

You're rigged to scale for joy.

One summer night in detention, there was a blackout.

The only darkness we'd experienced in all those years.

The hateful fluorescent lights were off and nobody could see us on the monitors.

Five minutes of joy that we talked about for months.

Then, recently, in my hometown of Melbourne, there was a storm blackout.

And instead of smiling in the lotus position, guess what I was worried about?

Food in the freezer, charging the electronics.

Some of the first world problems we complain about.

Oh, the weather, the Vancouver rain.

Well, in there, I have been in tears because I could finally smell the rain.

The traffic.

Well, in there, the only traffic was bumping into my cellmate along the one-meter-wide corridor along which to walk five meters.

Too many emails.

I went for months without a letter.

I had one phone call in all those years.

Annoying kids.

I used to have to imagine my kids' faces because I couldn't keep a photo of them in a cell.

So you see, when our canvas is so full, we look at that little smudge and we magnify it.

But when our canvas was bare, we could celebrate even one drop of colour.

And that's what I hope I will continue to do, and I hope you will join me.

Remind ourselves of the blindness so we can see life fully.

Like a newborn.

Thank you.