Lei Cheng

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.