Canada’s Miss World contestant stymied
Canada’s Miss World Contestant said she was barred Thursday from entering China to take part in this year’s pageant.
1 SHE SAYS IT’S ABOUT CENSORSHIP
Chinese-born Anastasia Lin — who is an outspoken human rights activist — said she was unable to board her connecting flight from Hong Kong to the southern island province of Hainan after a Chinese official told her by telephone that she would not be granted a visa on arrival. The pageant is being held in Sanya, China, this year. The 25-year-old beauty queen is an outspoken critic of Chinese religious policy and a follower of the Falun Gong, a meditation-based spiritual practice, which was outlawed by China’s ruling Communist Party in 1999. “If they start to censor beauty pageants — how pathetic is that?” Lin said in Hong Kong.
2 SHE’S CONSIDERED DANGEROUS
Lin, who moved to Canada from China when she was 13, wasn’t always a champion of free speech. In her early years, she says she was taught and mirrored the values of the Communist Party. That included a role as a student leader, she said, “and a student leader’s job was to spread propaganda.” She and her mother left China after her parents divorced and her eyes were “opened.” She told a U.S. congressional hearing in July that tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed so their organs could be harvested and sold for transplants. The actress also plays an imprisoned Falun Gong practitioner in an upcoming Canadian movie, The Bleeding Edge.
3 HER DAD HAS BEEN THREATENED
Lin said that after she won the Canadian title, Chinese security agents visited her father who still lives in China in an apparent attempt to intimidate her into silence. In an personal piece published in the Washington Post in June, she says her father, “fearing for his livelihood and business,” had asked her to stop advocating for human rights or he would not see her again. “Many people,” she wrote, “have asked me why I have continued speaking out after my father was threatened. The answer is simple: If I allow myself to be intimidated, then I am complicit in continued human rights abuses.”
4 SHE’S USING THE SPOTLIGHT
Although she hadn’t received an invitation letter from organizers, and therefore was unable to obtain a Chinese visa, she said she decided to travel to China from Toronto anyway in hopes of obtaining a visa on arrival. “To prevent me from even stepping into Chinese territory, I think this is what they’re trying to do. I really don’t see where this insecurity comes from,” Lin told The Associated Press. “I think that’s the real harm when people watch this and learn a negative lesson. I hope people see courage and hope in the story, not simply just being denied.”