Matthew went to get his iPhone fixed – and spent the next five years in a Beijing jail

Singapore: Australian Matthew Radalj was running a clothing business out of Beijing in January 2020 when he left his apartment one morning to collect his phone from an electronics market, where he had dropped it off days earlier for repairs.

What happened next would land him in jail for nearly the next five years, the victim, in his retelling of events, of an extortion attempt and a justice system that convicts 99 per cent of those who come before it.

Under what he says were torturous conditions, he would be forced to confess to robbery charges for stealing his own phone and cash and to violently resisting arrest.

Matthew Radalj with his dog Mei Mei in Beijing before his arrest.

Speaking four months after he walked free from Beijing Number 2 prison, Radalj, who grew up in Perth, says he and about 100 inmates in his working group spent eight hours most weekdays doing menial tasks in the prison labour system – putting magazines into envelopes, filling plastic bags with coupon stickers, assembling small electronic parts – before returning to their small, squalid cells. He earnt less than the equivalent of $1 after months of work.

Each morning, the inmates would be forced to march into the factory to the tune of Chinese Communist Party propaganda “red” songs. The lyrics are burnt into his brain: Wo ai ni zhongguo.

“It means ‘I love you, China’,” says Radalj. “The Chinese system is designed to extract as much suffering from you as possible. At a certain point, you’re not even human any more.”

The market repair that went wrong

Radalj says when he arrived at the electronics market on January 3, 2020, the shop owner, a man called Wei, had more than doubled the agreed price to fix his smashed yellow iPhone 11 and put a new deal on the table. It was now going to cost him 3500 yuan ($767), but Wei’s friend would buy the phone for 1000 yuan and settle his debt. Radalj rejected the deal, paid the original price, took his phone and left.

But as he was exiting the market, he was set upon by security guards carrying pepper spray and electric batons. He fought back, he says, grabbing the pepper spray and using it on one of the security officers and stunning another with a baton he seized in the brawl before being chased into the street, where he was subdued by a mob.

“I had to basically fight for my life,” he says. “I wasn’t some bogan on holidays in China stirring up the locals. It was a shakedown.”

Radalj says when he arrived at the electronics market on January 3, 2020, the shop owner had more than doubled the agreed price to fix his smashed iPhone 11, and put a new deal on the table.

After his arrest, Radalj says he endured cruel treatment at a detention centre until he agreed to sign a “leniency document” confessing to the robbery charges. He was left in rooms for long stretches with static playing through speakers, and he was forced to strip naked and go outside in Beijing’s sub-zero winter. For 10 months, he had no access to money, meaning he couldn’t buy a toothbrush, toilet paper or underwear, nor could he call his family or friends, who were becoming increasingly worried.

Radalj says he was held in Beijing Number 3 Detention Centre for 504 days before being transferred to Beijing Number 2 Prison, where he spent 1230 days.

Maarten Gerard first met Radalj in 2008 when he was working as an award-winning bartender in Macau. He says he and his friends became alarmed when Radalj stopped responding to messages in 2020, and his social media accounts went dormant.

“He disappeared basically,” Gerard says.

“When I heard he was in jail in China, I immediately assumed that it must have been a situation of wrong place, wrong time. At the time, it was happening in China a lot.”

At the mercy of China’s legal system

Radalj’s story is an apparent example of how a confluence of circumstance, harsh laws and policing, and geopolitical jostling can conspire in a devastating way to leave foreigners at the mercy of China’s unflinching legal system.

His situation was worsened by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, during which the prison was sealed off. It also made consular access difficult and soured the Australia-China relationship during the Morrison government era.

“Even in the police station, they were saying, ‘You’re Australian. This is China. Australia is not our friend’,” Radalj says.

By the time Radalj was arrested, bilateral ties had been on a downward slide since at least 2018. Australia became increasingly concerned about Chinese state threats to national security, passed foreign influence laws and banned Huawei from the 5G network. But it plummeted in April 2020, when Australia led calls for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, and China retaliated by slapping $20 billion of trade sanctions against key Australian exports. Diplomatic ties have since thawed, though the relationship remains volatile.

A former British fraud investigator in China, Peter Humphrey, who has become an advocate for the wrongfully detained since his own imprisonment in 2013 on what he says were false charges, says Radalj’s case is similar to others he has encountered, where police and vendors collaborate against foreigners. Forced confessions, he says, are the linchpin of China’s judicial system.

Sky News presenter Cheng Lei spent three years in a Chinese jail.Credit: Elke Meitzel

“Once you’ve been captured into that system, from day one, as soon as a decision has been taken to put someone away, whoever signs off on that order has immediately got a political stake in it never being reversed,” he says.

There is little way to independently verify Radalj’s account. No reports of his arrest, sentencing or release appeared in the media until his case was revealed last month by Sky News presenter Cheng Lei, herself a survivor of a three-year jail term in Beijing on spurious charges.

Court documents contain the authorities’ version of events, which Radalj rejects – that he confessed to robbing 1000 yuan from Wei, had taken an iPhone 11 and “used pepper spray and violent methods to resist” arrest. He was sentenced in November 2020 following a trial he says lasted only minutes and received a four-year sentence. Wei was given the iPhone by the court.

China maintains its justice system operates on rule-of-law principles. The Chinese embassy in Australia did not respond to a request for comment.

Australians in Chinese jails

Radalj was among 64 Australians imprisoned in China in 2024, a number of them on drug-related charges. Their cases mostly fly under the radar, often due to families being advised that advocacy will only worsen their situation.

Radalj tells his story as China renews its efforts to present itself as a safe and welcoming destination, rolling out visa-free travel to citizens of countries including Australia, which it says drove a tourism boom of more than 20 million arrivals last year.

But the Australian government urges travellers to exercise a high degree of caution in China, warning of the “risk of arbitrary detention or harsh enforcement of local laws, including broadly defined national security laws”.

Radalj’s account of his harsh prison experience bears similarities to reports relating to the treatment of Chinese-Australian writer Yang Hengjun, who is also in Beijing Number 2 Prison.

Yang, a former Chinese Ministry of State Security officer turned Australian citizen and Chinese government critic, was handed a suspended death sentence last year for espionage offences, details of which have never been publicly disclosed. Supporters say he is seriously ill and that he has been forced to choose between buying food, hygiene products, or warm clothes for the freezing conditions.

“He was in another working group to me, but I saw him, I’ve met him. He was on a stretcher many times going to hospital,” Radalj says.

He is critical of how the Department of Foreign Affairs handled his case and he has filed a written complaint accusing it of poor practices and of providing inadequate support. His criticisms include an initial meeting at which he says consular officials arrived with no petty cash to assist him and handed him a list of lawyer contacts, failing to realise he could not take the piece of paper back to his cell.

Matthew Radalj, who spent nearly five years in jail in China on what he says were false robbery charges, with wife Mimi. They married in January.

That was his last contact for months. COVID-19 restrictions put in place soon afterwards meant consular staff had difficulties visiting detained Australians for the next two years in China.

In a statement, a DFAT spokesman said it “provided consular assistance to an Australian detained in China. Owing to our privacy obligations, we are unable to provide further comment.”

The light at the end of the tunnel

Weeks before his initial release date, Radalj’s sentence was extended by nine months after he was convicted of punching a Taiwanese inmate and breaking his nose during a brawl, an act he doesn’t dispute, though he says it was in self-defence.

For this, he says he was put in solitary confinement for 194 days in a pitch-black cell measuring 1.8 metres by 1.2 metres.

He kept sane by writing in his journal, which he smuggled out of jail, rekindling his faith in God and holding out hope of reuniting with his fiancee, Mimi. They married last month in Dimapur, India.

“She’s been the light at the end of what was at times a very dark and very long tunnel,” Radalj says.

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