An eight-word text message got an Australian journalist three years in a Chinese cell.

Cheng Lei texted a Bloomberg contact economic figures from a public government report, seven minutes before an embargo lifted. That was the entire case. China charged her with "supplying state secrets."

She spent the first six months under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, forced to sit still for 14 hours a day with two guards staring from a foot away, lights always on, no closing her eyes until bedtime. Her own words: designed to make you want to die.

At trial, she learned her surveillance began days after Australia's foreign minister called for an international inquiry into COVID's origins in Wuhan. She still isn't certain that's why she was targeted. She's fairly certain it wasn't a coincidence.

Released in 2023, she now says what China actually is: a government that treats its own citizens and diaspora as potential enemies, one that can turn on you without warning, no matter how loyal you were to it.

She's publishing her memoir in Mandarin next month. Her own words about what to expect: "There is nothing the Chinese government fears more than its own people, even when they're overseas."

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