China has again enforced a travel ban on outspoken author Liao Yiwu, preventing him from attending a literary festival in Australia and warning him not to try to publish his work overseas.
Liao had been scheduled to speak about China's rising power and human rights record at the Sydney Writers' Festival, organizers said on Monday.
"Our primary concern is for Liao Yiwu, who has been denied the fundamental right to express his views freely," festival artistic director Chip Rolley said in a statement.
"We are astonished by the Chinese government's additional demand that he not publish his works internationally."
The ban came as U.S. and Chinese officials began economic and strategic bilateral talks in Washington, amid calls for greater pressure on Beijing over its human rights record.
Liao had also been scheduled to recite some of his poetry and discuss his work "The Corpse Walker," a series of interviews with people living in the margins of Chinese society.
Call for 'pressure'
Liao, whose work has included a poem titled "Massacre," commemorating those who died in the 1989 military crackdown in Beijing, called on the Australian government to put more pressure on Beijing.
"It is also important for the Australian government to use ... economic transactions as a bargaining chip, and to pressure the Chinese government to improve their human rights record," Liao told Australia's public broadcaster, ABC, through an interpreter.
Last month, author Salman Rushdie led a protest in New York after Liao, who is also known as Lao Wei, was stopped from boarding a plane to the United States.
Liao was prevented by police from leaving China to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.
"The police talked to him about it and told him that he couldn't leave China," Liao's wife said in an interview at the time. "It was only a literary event, nothing more, but the police said it was sensitive, and that it wasn't the right time."
"There was nothing we could do about it. We're getting kind of used to it, because Liao has been prevented from going overseas at least 10 times now," she said. "It's very wearisome."
Films withdrawn
The latest crackdown on dissent in China began following anonymous online calls for a "Jasmine" revolution, inspired by recent uprisings in the Middle East.
The State Department said last week that its discussions with China on human rights would focus on "human rights developments, including the recent negative trend of forced disappearances, extralegal detentions, and arrests and convictions."
Beijing responded to the annual State Department report on its human rights situation with its own appraisal of the human rights situation in the United States.
In 2009, Chinese directors withdrew films from the Melbourne International Film Festival in protest at the screening of a film about exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer.
Beijing has blamed Kadeer and the exile World Uyghur Congress for instigating ethnic riots which rocked the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Urumqi, just weeks beforehand.
Reported by Luisetta Mudie.