Lei Cheng

speaker

240 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard Jun 2025

Lei Cheng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TED Talks Daily · What I learned about freedom in a secret Chinese prison | Lei Cheng · 3 Jun 2025 podcast

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.

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