“Of course there is no way literature can resist a political force,” he told reporters at a hastily arranged news conference. But he said that “in fiction we find our real roots: the goodness of human nature.”

There had been concern that Ma might be taking a security risk by even traveling to Hong Kong, where a few booksellers who published titles critical of China’s Communist government have disappeared in recent years, only to turn up in custody on the Chinese mainland.

Ma’s books have been banned in mainland China since 1987, and he says his new novel, the biting satire “China Dream,” is a political allegory of the country’s modern self.

On Saturday, Ma declined to directly answer a question about whether he felt safe in Hong Kong, but he noted that he had informed British authorities of his travel plans.

Emily Lau, a former Democratic Party member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, said she believed the Hong Kong Jockey Club had faced political pressure to cancel Ma’s visit, and that the reversal of the cancellation was not much of a victory because it had already set a damaging precedent.

“In Hong Kong we’ve never had democracy, but we enjoy freedoms,” she said. “Now it seems our freedoms are being taken away.”

Ma, 65, has been barred from entering mainland China since 2011, and he spoke at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival as recently as 2013.

He was back this year to speak at a panel discussion on Hong Kong literature and to promote “China Dream,” whose title refers to the signature catchphrase of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. He said he feared that building the “China dream” that Xi envisions would require erasing China’s recent history.

“If we ignore history, what follows will be something even more horrible,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Mike Ives © 2018 The New York Times