Charlotte Chou, jailed Australian woman, could be freed next year Charlotte Chou during her trial. Beijing: In a rare, if partial, victory in one of a string of murky cases involving ethnic Chinese Australians detained in China, entrepreneur Charlotte Chou is set to walk free next year after her jail term for embezzlement was shortened following a retrial. A court in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou struck out one of Ms Chou's embezzlement charges on Friday, but upheld another, trimming her eight-year jail sentence by three years. Taking into account time served, Ms Chou is expected to be released in December next year. Despite the reduced sentence, Ms Chou told the court that she would continue to fight for an innocent verdict and would appeal to the Guangdong High Court to have the case completely thrown out. Charlotte Chou is escorted to court. "She's not guilty and should come out straight away," her sister Fiona Zou said from Guangzhou. But Ms Chou's detention has come at huge personal toll. She has not seen her youngest son Lincoln since she was first detained in mid-2008, while the then one-year-old was sleeping. On Friday, she was allowed a brief but emotional reunion with her other son, Cleon Huang, 18, for the first time since 2008. She has also lost the successful business she helped build, in a case mired in controversy involving feuding business partners and allegations of judicial bribery. Ms Chou's supporters insist that a rival business partner had been paying Guangzhou authorities to keep her in jail, in order to wrest control of the profitable private university she helped establish, the South China Institute of Software Engineering. Australian citizen Charlotte Chou with her son Lincoln when he was born. "She has been very calm considering all she has experienced over all this time," her lawyer, Chen Yongzhong said. The dropped charge revolved around a 29 million yuan ($5.3 million) amount prosecutors say was embezzled from the private university , but which Ms Chou's lawyers have long argued was a clearly documented loan. Prosecutors acknowledged for the first time during the retrial in October that the loan did in fact exist, in what was considered a breakthrough in the case at the time. Bank records and shareholder documents proving existence of the loan had previously not been considered by the court, Ms Chou is just one of a number of ethnic Chinese Australians embroiled in legal trouble in China. Travel entrepreneur Matthew Ng was sentenced to 11½ years in jail in March last year in Guangzhou, while cardiac surgeon Du Zuying is in detention in Shandong. She remains guilty of a separate misappropriation charge involving a 1.3 million yuan payment to a contractor. Ms Chou was initially sentenced to 18 months' jail on bribery charges, after Guangzhou police obtained a sleep-deprived confession during interrogation. Upon her release in 2009, she was immediately rearrested at the prison gate and charged with fresh counts of embezzlement.