HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY COSTS A CANADIAN A SHOT AT MISS WORLD
Beijing bars model and Falun Gong-practitioner Anastasia Lin from attending the 65th annual beauty contest on China’s Hainan island
Clasping hands with youngsters in red Communist Youth League scarves, contestants from more than 110 nations descended on the southern Chinese island of Hainan last week for the 65th annual Miss World contest. But one contestant was absent from the opening ceremony: Miss Canada, otherwise known as Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old actress and classically trained pianist who was denied a Chinese visa to attend the month-long pageant, presumably because of her outspoken advocacy for human rights and religious freedom in China.
After waiting in vain for weeks, Lin packed up her Canadian-designed evening wear last Wednesday and quietly boarded a Hong Kong-bound flight with the hope she might obtain an on-demand visa at the border and perhaps slip unnoticed into China. It was not to be. The Chinese authorities, tipped off to her arrival, barred her from flying onward to Hainan.
Speaking by telephone from Hong Kong, Lin said she was angry and disappointed, but not entirely surprised. “I have every right to be at that event,” she said. “It’s kind of sad. I mean, I’m just an acting student and a beauty queen. What could they possibly be so afraid of?”
Lin, it turns out, has become Beijing’s worst nightmare. A Chinese emigre who moved to Canada as an adolescent, she is a practitioner of Falun Gong, the Buddhism-inspired spiritual movement that China has deemed an “evil cult”. She is also charismatic, canny and media-savvy.
Despite threats to family members in China, she has refused to back away from her official pageant platform of speaking out about human rights abuses in the country of her birth.
Her David-and-Goliath clash with the Chinese government has drawn sympathetic media attention and legions of supporters around the world, providing her with an even bigger platform to speak out about the imprisonment and torture Falun Gong adherents face in China.
“If I don’t speak out for what’s right, it will send out a terrible message to those who experience China’s fear and intimidation and don’t have the ability to fight back,” she explained in a recent interview in Toronto, Canada. Lin’s confrontation with Beijing highlights the contradictory impulses of Chinese leaders: The desire to silence critics both influential and insignificant, and the yearning to be a respected world power.
The Chinese Embassy i n Ottawa declined to comment on Lin’s visa application, but issued a statement on Thursday saying: “China welcomes all lawful activities organised in China by international organisations or agencies, including the Miss World pageant. But China does not allow any persona non grata to come to China.”
As China’s economic and diplomatic stature has grown, so, too, has its ability to project its influence well beyond its borders. Hollywood, eager to gain access to China’s vast market, has altered film scripts to please China’s censors, and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has been widely criticised at home for seeking to curry favour with Beijing by avoiding public discussion of China’s human-rights abuses.
Minxin Pei, an expert in Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said Beijing has become increasingly successful in bending others to its will.
“Chinese leaders are realists and they know that people will hold their noses and continue to kowtow to them because they have a big chequebook,” he said. “The way they are treating Anastasia Lin is part of a larger strategy for deterring would-be critics: The proverbial slaughter of the chicken that is killed to frighten all those monkeys.”
Lin, however, refuses to be a chicken. In May, days after winning the Miss Canada contest in Vancouver, she says security agents visited her father, who remains in China, and urged him to rein in his daughter’s talk about human rights.
When she reached him by phone, he refused to talk, hinting that the line was being monitored, but he threatened to sever ties with her if she did not comply.
Instead, Lin went public with the threats to her father, who owns a medical equipment company. She wrote an oped in The Washington Post and testified before a congressional hearing on human rights in China.
He subsequently cut off financial support.
She said her father was emblematic of the mindset that hobbles many Chinese, who have been traumatised by the country’s turbulent past and are too fearful to stand up for what they believe is right.
“It’s sad because my father thinks putting a picture of Mao in his office will bring him protection,” she said. “But his support of the Communist Party isn’t really about love, it’s about fear.”
Lin has had a taste of the government’s ability to inspire both love and fear in its citizens. As the anointed leader of her middle-school class in Hunan, Lin was charged with demonising Falun Gong by organising viewings of a propaganda film and telling students they should report practitioners to the police.
Even after she and her mother emigrated to Canada in 2003, she developed a set of talking points to defend Communism during social-studies class. “It’s hard to shed a lifetime of indoctrination,” she said. “I mean, one of the first songs we learn in kindergarten is The Communist Party is closer to me than my mother.”
All that changed the day her mother handed her a book produced by Falun Gong supporters that detailed the persecution its practitioners endure in China.
Although Lin has earned widespread support from her fellow Canadians, she has been disappointed by the silence from the government of Justin Trudeau, who was elected prime minister last month. In an email, Francois Lasalle, a Foreign Affairs spokesman, said “Canada is committed to constructive engagement with China on human rights”, but he declined to comment on China’s refusal to give Lin a visa.
The Miss World Organisation, whose motto is “beauty with a purpose”, has also refused to publicly advocate on her behalf, though Lin says pageant officials have offered to allow her to compete in next year’s finals.
Officials with the London-based organisation did not return phone messages and emails seeking comment. On Thursday, Lin’s photo was conspicuously absent from the organisation’s online roster of Miss World contestants.
“They’re just going to hang me out to dry,” Lin said.
Ike Lalji, chief executive of Miss World Canada, has been more outspoken, saying he is disappointed by China’s intransigence. “Some people don’t respect pluralism and diversity,” he said. “It would be a good thing, and help bring about peace in the world, if we were to embrace one another’s cultures and beliefs.”
If I don’t speak out for what’s right, it will send out a terrible message to those who experience China’s fear and intimidation
ANASTASIA LIN