'You either abandon your ideals, or you risk being arrested,' a mainland dissident writer said this month.
'I've not written for nearly a year, I daren't take media interviews any more, I can't meet with other writers and I've given up taking part in political activities,' said the writer, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The writer, a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, of which jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo was president, said the stepping up of harassment of dissident writers amid an increasingly tense political atmosphere during the past year has intimidated him into giving up writing.
He is just one of many dissident writers who say that they have been given fresh warnings in recent weeks to refrain from writing essays on politically sensitive topics.
Many say they were also warned that surveillance of them would be escalated in the coming year, before the leadership reshuffle expected at the 18th Communist Party congress this autumn, with the authorities feeling increasingly jittery about simmering social discontent.
A sense of fear is pervading literary circles, some writers say, after a recent spate of heavy jail terms handed out to writers and activists.