My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.

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

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

Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.

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.

In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will belies waiting on the road ahead.