Told to report immediately to the local police station, Chou left her son, by then sound asleep, in the care of his nanny. It would be more than six years before she saw him again.

On Wednesday morning this week, Chou, 50, arrived home in Sydney to an emotional reunion with her elderly parents and Lincoln, now a seven-year-old primary school student on Sydney's north shore, who greeted her at the airport with two welcome-home balloons and a long hug.

"It was so emotional, my mind went completely blank," Chou said.

Being apart from Lincoln was the hardest thing to contend with in jail, she says, but she wants to use her personal story to send a message: that for all the opportunities it presents, doing business in China comes with its fair share of risks that need to be understood.

"Don't think it's so far-fetched and it can't happen to you, the detention centre is not that far away," she says. "It could be the political risks or the legal environment, you can't see this in business or legal manuals."

There are other cautionary tales too. As Fairfax Media has reported, heightened drug trafficking activity from China to Australia has seen as many as 11 Australians arrested in Guangzhou, a busy transit hub, on serious drug charges in the past year, some potentially facing the death penalty.

Chou said during her incarceration, she had noticed a dramatic spike in the past year in foreigners, including Australian, American, Swiss, Korean, Japanese and other Asians numbering well into the dozens, being detained on suspicion of trafficking methamphetamine, the drug commonly known as ice. Many, she says, protest their innocence, saying the drugs were planted on them without their knowledge.

In a story of a similar vein to numerous others, one American woman, an office secretary in her 30s, was told she had won a prize but had to travel to Guangzhou to collect it. After waiting for nearly two weeks, she was told she then had to go to Sydney to collect it, and was provided with extra suitcases to help with the load. Unable to detect anything suspicious with the naked eye, she was arrested at airport customs two months ago – bags of ice were concealed in the lining of the luggage.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a travel advisory in September warning "travellers have been asked to carry goods concealing narcotics out of China", and that in recent months authorities had executed foreigners found guilty of smuggling drugs.

Chou was released from Guangzhou's No 1 Detention Centre on Saturday, having spent a total of 6½ years behind bars, convicted in murky circumstances of bribery and embezzlement amid a bitter dispute with a former business partner, Hong Kong businessman Zhu Hanbang, over a successful private university she helped establish in 2002.

Convicted on the basis of a sleep-deprived four-day interrogation without access to lawyers or consular officials, she was released after an initial 18-month sentence, only to be immediately rearrested at the prison gates in front of waiting family and friends. She would be jailed for a further five years, in what her lawyers and supporters insist was a plot by Zhu to keep her in jail in order to wrest control of the university from her.

The cruel twist at the prison gates haunts Chou and her family to this day, and motivated her request for an extended interview with Fairfax Media in Guangzhou upon her release to be published only upon her safe return to Australia.

The interview – an account of surviving China's harsh prison conditions, its labyrinthine judicial system, but ultimately a cautionary tale of the risks of doing business in China – will be published online on Friday.