out. Dai Qing joined other scholars by calling on the government to curtail corruption and support democratic reform. When students staged large protests that included a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, Dai Qing made a passionate speech there, encouraging students to leave peacefully to avoid bloodshed. If they stayed, she warned, they could provoke a violent crackdown that could seriously set back the process of reform. She was not heeded, and the crackdown came on June 4. After the incident, many scholars either went into hiding, were detained, or fled overseas. Dai Qing, not knowing whether to flee or not, only managed to make phone calls everyday to comfort her friends and relatives. According to one of her famous books, Wo de Ruyu (My Imprisonment; 我的入獄), Dai mentioned that the police had visited her the day before her imprisonment as a way of warning her. However, she did not plan to run away for her life because she loved her country. She said, "As a citizen of a country, I cannot leave her. And I have to criticise it in order to build a more perfect and stronger one." Dai Qing was arrested in July 1989 and imprisoned on the charge of "advocating bourgeois liberalization and instigating civil unrest." She spent the next ten months at maximum security facility Qingcheng Prison. She was formally denounced by her former co-workers at Guangming Daily, and in September of that year the Press and Publication Bureau banned domestic sales of her writings. Upon her release in May 1990, Dai Qing was forbidden from further publication within China. The government kept her under surveillance and restricted her ability to travel. She was offered political asylum by the United States and Germany, but turned them both down. Instead, she wrote a book about her time in Qingcheng titled My Imprisonment (我的入獄), which she was able to have published in Hong King and Taiwan. Her daughter graduated from Beijing University that year, but was denied further opportunities for study after she refused to formally denounce her mother. In her book, she said, "What I can fight for is to let others know I am innocent but have a rebellious spirit." As a former reporter for the Guangming Daily, she used to write frequently. However, her imprisonment after the publication of the Yangtze! Yangtze! made her change. From Wo de Ruyu, she declared she would no longer