But it was a remarkable feat of diplomacy from the Department of Foreign Affairs negotiators and two Australian governments to extract the 48-year-old Melbourne mother of two from the world’s greatest exponent of arbitrary detention in that span of time.
Just ask Taiwanese businessman Lee Meng-chu,who spent four years in jail for taking photos of police. Or Hideji Suzuki,the Japanese exchange leader who was bundled into a van and imprisoned for six years.
Or Australia’sYang Hengjun,a writer and critic of the Chinese government who remains in a Beijing prison four years after he was arrested,unaware of the charges against him.
Delay,delay,delay. Cheng’s sentencing was delayed more than six times after her trial. The Chinese system is built around playing for time to either extract a confession or a concession from a foreign government. In Cheng’s case,neither appears to have come.
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By Wednesday morning,China expelled Cheng after handing down a sentence of two years and 11 months for “illegally providing state secrets to a foreign country” and taking into account the time already served.
“The judicial processes were completed,” Albanese said after announcing Cheng had arrived back in Melbourne to hold her family again,while providing little indication of the enormous effort undertaken to secure her freedom.