I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

Red Dust was about the late 1980s; it was a time of burgeoning hopes and opening up and people searching for new ways.

It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.

I wanted to analyse and understand how the Chinese people could have their lives so crushed by fear.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.