“I was scared out of my mind” … Troy Bremer (at left) with a fellow inmate, Mongolian Batar Batuka, at Beijing’s Municipal prison No 2. Love had taken him to China. He met Jamie, a 24-year-old Chinese national, while she was attending a conference as an interpreter in Sydney in 2004. "I met her, or rather picked her up, in a coffee shop," says Bremer, giving a rare smile as he savours the memory. "I could tell she was a tourist. I was 25." The pair struck up a friendship and, by the time Jamie flew back to Beijing, Bremer was smitten. He visited Jamie in China in 2004, and the following year quit his job at a department store in Sydney, packing his bags for a long trip. "I was young and I had a girl over there," he says. "I wanted to see Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China. I hadn't taken any time off between school and going to uni, so I just decided to go." Bremer appears to be a little unworldly, a dreamer. It's hard to know what he is thinking at any particular point, but he appears surprisingly calm given what he's been through over the past seven years. "I find it very difficult to lose my temper," he reflects. "I put a stopper on it." He's also clearly a man who likes the company of women. He explains over coffee in a Sydney cafe that his problems started a couple of months after arriving in Beijing. He'd begun a two-timing flirtation - he insists it wasn't sexual - with a second woman, Zhang Shijun, known by the English name, Alice, who was also living in Beijing. She had been put in contact with Bremer through a mutual friend in Sydney, who passed on his number. They became close, with Alice expressing her hope that they could get married so that she could get a visa to Australia. She had no idea that Bremer already had a girlfriend.

“He used to be a big guy, but now he’s just skin and bone” … Australian citizen James Sun was in jail with Troy Bremer. But Chinese court documents paint a far less rosy and romantic view of the relationship. Alice claims that in August 2005, Bremer phoned her, asking for help to reclaim a safety deposit box, which he told her was being transferred to a Chinese bank from London. The box, Bremer said, contained $US10 million. According to the prosecution, Bremer asked Alice for $US8800 to pay the fees owed on transferring the safety deposit box. He claimed to have inherited $US30 million from a cousin and that more funds were needed to secure the legacy. Alice told the court she first borrowed $8800 from her boss, Han Bo, and transferred it to the account nominated by Bremer, named Handling Charge. But that was not the end of it. Bremer came back to her twice more, asking for additional money in order to lay his hands on the millions. Alice claimed that she sold her house and then her car to meet Bremer's demands and pay back her boss, despite friends warning that Bremer's story seemed implausible. It was around this time, in November 2005, that Jamie snooped through the text messages on Bremer's phone, which he had left lying about their apartment. Furious, she called Alice, telling her she was Bremer's girlfriend and live-in lover. The two women met up, with Alice discovering to her astonishment that Bremer had lied about his upbringing, assets and upcoming $30 million inheritance. In fact, Bremer came from a modest middle-class background in Australia. There were no rich relatives or boxes of cash being jetted around the world to international banks. Bremer's parents had divorced when he was young and he grew up with his mother, a nurse, and one sister in Sydney's inner west. He had had little to do with his father. He had gone to Ashfield Boys High, then begun an economics degree at the University of Western Sydney before dropping out to work instead.

When she realised Bremer had been lying to her, Alice went to the police, and after a two-month investigation, charges were laid in January 2006. But that was only after - according to court documents - Bremer had received 223,000 yuan ($38,000 today) and spent a further 15,000 yuan ($2500) on Alice's credit card. Bremer is adamant there was no evidence the money made it to his accounts. He claims Alice sold her house because she was moving to the US and that the story is the concoction of a jilted woman. Wherever his guilt begins or ends in the matter - and he hotly denies trying to swindle Alice - 10 years is a long time to serve in a Chinese jail over this sum of money, particularly since Bremer's mother attempted to pay Alice back. Most likely, Australian authorities would have advised Alice and Bremer to sort out their matter privately. But in China there is a greater willingness by the authorities to take up cases in the criminal courts, particularly where one party is well connected or a state-owned enterprise is involved. There are more Australians jailed in China than in any other country. Yet almost nothing is known about them. Currently, 34 Australians are in jail in China and another 12 are in some form of detention there, either awaiting trial or being interrogated. The most common offences are commercial crimes, such as bribery, embezzlement and fraud. Most of the defendants are Chinese-born Australians who have returned to their country of birth to do business. The Australian government and embassy officials cite privacy for keeping the cases out of the public eye. However, some relatives have complained bitterly that the Australian government seems prepared to take up cases involving prisoners in Indonesia, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, but treads lightly when it comes to those involving China, because of the two countries' close trade relationship. The families, too, are reluctant to go public for fear of reprisals against their loved ones in jail. In Troy Bremer's case, four plain clothes' police arrived at the apartment he shared with Jamie in January 2006. As he didn't know Alice had gone to the police, he had no idea what they wanted, as his grasp of Mandarin was poor at this stage. But they showed badges and made it clear he was to come to the local police station in the city's Chaoyang district.

"I was there for over 15 hours without an interpreter," Bremer says. "Finally, I showed them my girlfriend's number in my mobile. They didn't want to call her at first, but eventually they did and after a couple of hours she arrived to interpret. Jamie thought everything would go away. She thought we would just answer the questions, maybe sign a piece of paper and that would be it. She had no idea what would happen." By now it was very late at night and Bremer was seriously worried. "They transferred me to a hospital for blood tests. By this stage I was shaking. Then I was taken to a detention centre. I arrived there at two or three in the morning. I tried to ring the embassy but no one was answering. "I was chained to a table in an interrogation room at the detention centre until about 10 in the morning. My girlfriend was not with me at this stage — she had gone to get some clothes for me. She just kept saying, 'Troy, just relax, and maybe this will all go away.' " "Relax?" he says now with a bitter laugh. Eventually, Bremer was placed in a four-by-six-metre cell at the detention centre with about 20 other prisoners. A large wooden shelf ran the length of the room for sleeping, but some people had to sleep on the floor. There was an Asian-style squat toilet and a tap with drinking water. Australian consular staff turned up two days after Bremer was arrested, after Jamie had alerted them and explained his predicament. "When my mum was first contacted in Australia, she was completely shocked," Bremer says. "She thought it was some kind of bad joke."

A Chinese-Australian friend went to China and tried to help by talking to the investigating officer. "This person tried to arrange something under the table, but it didn't work," Bremer says. Then Bremer's mother came over and raised money to pay for translators and lawyers. He estimates she spent more than $100,000 trying to help him. "I was scared out of my mind," Bremer says of his first days in jail. "I didn't know what was going on. There were Chinese, North Koreans, Africans. They all spoke broken English. At first I couldn't understand them." Over time, he would. A weird mix of Chinese and English, spoken in the accents of several continents, is the lingua franca of foreign prisoners in China. All up, Bremer would spend almost a year in the detention centre cell with up to 20 other prisoners before his trial in December 2006. His days were spent sitting on the wooden bench for hours at a time. Standing or going to the bathroom required the permission of the guards. The only entertainment, if that's what it could be called, was watching Chinese news for two hours in the evening. Talking was not permitted. Prisoners simply had to sit there. It was inside this detention centre that Bremer received his first beating, one so severe he had blood streaming down his face; it had begun because of his asthma. "Every time I had an attack, I needed medical attention, and they didn't have any medical equipment except a pillow with oxygen in it," he says. "So I had to go to the outside hospital and that meant other police officers needed to go with me to the outside. So the officer used to take me to an office and beat me." Bremer told the embassy when they came to visit, but this only made enemies of the officers. The embassy gave his mother a list of lawyers to contact and attended Bremer's trial. "I had a lawyer, but in China it's not much use. They just say, 'Thank you, thank you', to the judge."

The trial was over in 90 minutes, and a few weeks later he was brought back from the detention centre to hear the sentence. "My girlfriend and the embassy [staff] were in court," recalls Bremer. "She leant over and whispered, 'Ten years.' I said, 'What?' My heart dropped. Then my asthma started." He was also forced to pay a fine of 20,000 yuan ($3500) and his mother paid a compensation package to Alice. A subsequent appeal failed to reduce his sentence. Bremer arrived at municipal Prison No 2, one of China's 700 prisons, but one specially earmarked for foreign prisoners, in March 2007. The stark, grey concrete complex had been a chemical factory before being converted to a prison several decades ago, but Bremer says the water still had a chemical smell. "There were four levels in the jail, with a 'team' of approximately 100 prisoners on each floor," Bremer recalls. "I was put in a team for foreigners on the third floor. In 2007 there was only one team for foreigners. Most of them were in for drug trafficking offences, but some were there for murder, rape, espionage and fraud." There were Chinese-born foreigners, Africans, Koreans, Malaysians, Mongolians and Pakistanis. "I was the only Caucasian guy there most of the time," he says. There were eight people to a cell, which was just big enough to hold four sets of bunks. There was a hole-in-the-floor toilet, but not much else.

Beyond that, there was a mess room with a television, toilets and a wash room that was used for cleaning dishes and other washing tasks. The two showers were just pipes poking out of the wall. The lights were on 24 hours a day, including in the cells, and there were cameras and speakers everywhere. "It was literally Big Brother — not for three months, but for seven years," Bremer says. "If you are talking to someone and [the guards] don't like it, there is a beep from the speaker and you must stop talking. An officer is monitoring the cameras 24 hours, seven days a week." Prison life was lived almost entirely indoors. Bremer says prisoners were allowed out into the concrete courtyard on Wednesdays and Saturdays for about 45 minutes, but exercising was discouraged. He was given some work assembling electrical components, but for the most part he was left to sit — and sit. Breakfast, says Bremer, consisted of rice water, a kind of watery porridge. Lunch and dinner was cabbage and rice. Servings were small. Occasionally, on Chinese holidays, meat or fish were included in the meal. "Families were able to provide food, but you had to have connections to ensure it got into the jail," Bremer says. Often, purchased goods arrived well past their use-by dates, yet prisoners would still pay the inflated prices to try to keep their hunger at bay. The prison was ruled by a rigid points system that governed remissions on prisoners' sentences. The more points a prisoner had, the better, but getting to the maximum of five usually required a payment, says Bremer. Upon arrival, prisoners were given one point, and could accrue up to four more, but they lived under constant threat of losing them. "Most people who got five points were people who paid," he recalls. "The money isn't paid to the bureau; it's made to the officer in charge of giving the point."

Bremer had four points at one stage, but one of these was taken away because he needed medical treatment. "If you get sick, they cut your points. I got a 10-year sentence and got three reductions to it. If I didn't get my points cut, I would have been home in September last year." Bremer only did one stint in solitary confinement, but that was enough to convince him to avoid it at all costs in the future. He ignored a guard's order to leave another prisoner's cell, with the result that he was sent to the "small room" for 10 days. "In China, solitary confinement is the way the officers destroy your body, mind, heart and spirit. People came back from the small room paralysed. Two people died." Prisoners in solitary confinement were forced to sit in a squat position for up to 15 hours, or to kneel. One position — riding the motorbike — involved standing in a half squat for hours. Prisoners had to ask permission to move, and were punished if they even sneezed without permission. "In China, it doesn't matter whether it's true or false, right or wrong," says Bremer. "What they say goes and you don't ever challenge it. The only way to challenge it is to pay money." In the course of his time in prison, Bremer found that his treatment at the hands of officers was often shaped by what was happening in the news between China and Australia. "Australians got some of the worst treatment," he insists. "The guards regarded themselves as politicians. If your country had a good relationship with China, then there were fewer problems."

Australia's decision in 2011 to allow the establishment of a US Marines base outside Darwin was regarded as a slight by prison guards. "I am a prisoner, but I was treated as if I was responsible," says Bremer. Earlier, when Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu was arrested in 2009, that, too, had an impact. "The case was publicised in the Chinese media. The officers didn't like that." The prisons were also small bastions of capitalism in the communist state. "The officers were businessmen in blue uniforms: you name it, you could buy it. Tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, electronic machines, mobiles, food, anything. Because the food was no good, they used to advertise that they could provide better food for you." But, he adds, "I didn't have the contacts to arrange these things. You needed someone outside." Bremer became increasingly isolated. Once he moved to the prison from the detention centre, Jamie was unable to visit him because they were not married. Their relationship slowly fizzled out. When Bremer looked out of his cell, he could see the prison car park. "You would not think they were the cars of prison officers. They get paid only 3000 to 5000 yuan [$500 to $850] a month, but the car park was full of new cars." James Sun, another Australian, arrived at Municipal Prison No 2 in 2008, having been convicted in September 2007 of being a spy for Taiwan. The 40-year-old representative of a company that helped to organise education in Australia for Chinese students was on the same "team" as Bremer. But after a while, other inmates started telling Bremer, "You must not go near this person. Don't talk to him; it will be very bad for you. The officers will come after you."

Despite the warnings, Bremer and Sun gradually got to know one another: a snippet of a conversation in the washroom as they were washing plates, or at the urinal, or in the corridor. Sun had been snatched off the street in Beijing in early 2006 by security police while visiting his ageing mother. It took six days before the Australian embassy was notified of his arrest. He was then held for 22 months by the State Security Bureau in a special detention centre, used for those accused of espionage and political crimes. The embassy and Sun's family back in Australia — including his pregnant partner, Kelly (not her real name) — were barred from attending the trial because it involved national security; Sun refused his court-appointed lawyer. Before migrating to Australia in 2000, Sun had been in the Chinese air force, working in the procurement department and organising large-scale arms and equipment purchases. His crime, according to the only document given to the family, involved soliciting documents from his former air force buddies during his trips back to recruit students to study in Australia, and spiriting these out of the country on DVDs marked as episodes of a popular Chinese soap opera. He was accused of "seducing'' a former colleague still in the air force into copying more than 1000 classified documents and of passing them to Taiwan. But Kelly insists her husband is not a spy and his confession was delivered under pressure: "He's never been to Taiwan and he doesn't know anyone from Taiwan," she says. Sun was sentenced to death for being a spy. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but he still has 18 years remaining before there is any chance of release. A recent application under the prisoner transfer treaty, which would have allowed Sun to serve out the balance of his sentence in Australia, was rejected by the Chinese authorities. The Australian government refused to comment on whether it considered his conviction for spying justified. However, the case drew a furious response from the Taiwanese representative in Australia, who vigorously denied that James Sun was a spy. Sun, says Bremer, suffered even worse treatment than him because the Chinese regard espionage as worse than murder or rape. He was put in a cell with the most unsavoury prisoners, including one who had murdered and then raped his victim, and was shackled and deprived of the most basic rights — including permission to call the embassy — that were permitted to other prisoners in the jail. "He used to be a big guy, kind of fat, but now he's just skin and bone," says Bremer.

In desperation at their treatment, the two came up with a plan to send an "SOS" message covertly out of the jail to the Australian authorities to let them know what was going on inside Chinese prisons. Sun and Bremer decided that Bremer should dictate a paragraph of their SOS letter during his monthly phone call to his mother. This posed a big risk. If the Chinese listened to the tape of the call and figured out what Bremer was doing, he risked losing points or going into solitary confinement. But both men were determined. Kelly, along with Sun's mother, sent the transcribed paragraphs to then foreign minister Stephen Smith, then PM Kevin Rudd, and his then deputy Julia Gillard, as well as to several opposition and Green MPs. "Even though China's economy has been increasing and becoming much stronger, the system does not change," the letter read. "Here in prison, we are afflicted too much, and even the most basic of human rights we do not have. We are suffering not only the physical torture but the mental torment as well. "If you want to know the cruel situation here, just watch the movie The Shawshank Redemption again. Our situation is actually much worse than the situation in the movie." Kelly says she received a reply from DFAT and from several MPs, but the only change for Sun was that consular visits became more regular. "You send an SOS and all you get is visits once a month," Bremer notes with a derisive snort. DFAT also confirms to Good Weekend that Bremer's mother had raised concerns about her son's medical treatment for asthma. The department assured her that it would continue to assist Bremer in obtaining the treatment he needed while in jail.

One of the great frustrations experienced by foreign prisoners at Municipal Prison No 2 was their inability to report mistreatment to consular officials because visits take place through a glass window with a guard always present. Visits and calls were also recorded, Bremer says, and other inmates were used as interpreters to check on what prisoners were telling their embassies. Bremer claims he was beaten almost weekly, but the thrashing that resulted in temporary paralysis, in 2010, was the worst. When the embassy next visited, Bremer says he was shipped to the outside hospital so his injuries would not be seen. The embassy queried his absence and Sun told them Bremer required medical attention. The incident prompted a high-level visit by the Australian Consul-General in Beijing. DFAT says it did tell a senior prison official that the Australian embassy was taking a close interest in Bremer's case and that it "continued to monitor Mr Bremer's welfare closely". But this wasn't without consequences. Kelly says James Sun later told her in a rare phone call that he'd been accused of inciting a fellow prisoner to make trouble and was punished. Kelly has not seen James for seven years, since before their son Tommy was born. She is unable to visit because she is a de facto, though Tommy has been to the jail several times with his grandmother during visits to China. "When other children speak of their father, he keeps silent," she says. "When the school teacher asked pupils to bring in family photos and introduce their family, I couldn't find a single photo of us three."

Soon Kelly will have to tell Tommy the real story about his father. Meanwhile, she worries whether her partner will survive the next 18 years in a Chinese jail. On his release on May 3 from Municipal Prison No 2, Bremer — by now 35 — was sent straight from the jail to the airport. He stepped off the plane in Sydney to an emotional reunion with his mother. " My mother was very teary," he says. "She was shocked to see my hair had turned completely grey." She has since helped him dye it back to its original brown. DFAT has not contacted Bremer since his return to Australia. Jamie — the reason for his journey to China in the first place — has long disappeared from his life. "Seven years is a long time," he says ruefully. AUSTRALIANS IMPRISONED IN CHINA

• In 2008, Australian businesswoman CHARLOTTE CHOU was accused of embezzling funds from a private university she helped establish in China, the South China Institute of Software Engineering. According to Chou's supporters, a former minority shareholder in the company used influence with officials to try to gain control of the school. Chou was first arrested in June 2008. She was released after serving 18 months in jail on bribery convictions, only to be immediately re-arrested at the prison gate on charges of embezzling millions of yuan. She has maintained that the money was merely repayments of a properly documented loan. She is serving an eight-year sentence in a Guangzhou prison, but has recently been granted leave to appeal. • Rio Tinto executive STERN HU, an Australian citizen, was detained on July 5, 2009, with three other Chinese colleagues over iron ore deals he was negotiating on behalf of Rio. In March 2010, Hu was sentenced to 10 years' jail for stealing commercial secrets and receiving bribes. Hu's personal laptop allegedly contained confidential business information of several dozen major business partners of Rio Tinto deemed much too specific and precise to have been acquired through legal means. • CARL MATHER was jailed for assault for one year after an incident involving four men who visited his Nanjing apartment and demanded to see his Chinese-born wife, Xie Qun, about an ongoing dispute over Xie's candy trading business. Mather used a stick and later a kitchen knife to try to ward off the intruders. He was convicted of assault after being found guilty of inflicting a knife injury on one of the intruders and injuring the finger of another when it was jammed in the door. Mather was recently released after his sentence was reduced to six months. • Australian businessman MATTHEW NG was arrested in November 2010 and is serving 11 1/2 years in a Guangzhou jail for embezzlement. His legal team insisted he was the victim of a commercial dispute between his group of companies, Et-China, and the state-run Lingnan group, which had sold Ng a controlling interest in GZL, which runs a network of travel agencies. But trouble hit after Et-China agreed to sell the business to Swiss travel giant Kuoni for $100 million, and Lingnan attempted to reverse the deal. • DU ZUYING, a 60-year-old Australian cardiac surgeon, has been jailed for four years after a dispute with his local partner, who allegedly stripped him of the business he founded and listed it on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Du was detained in Beijing on February 9, 2011, as he was about fly to Australia to see his wife and twin sons, Tommy and Bruce. He is currently appealing the sentence for misuse of business funds but has been waiting for a decision for more than a year. The company Du founded, China Biologic Products, supplies blood plasma products to Chinese hospitals and is worth about $650 million.

Lead-in photography by Tim Bauer. Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events.