A friend of Miss World Canada says the outspoken contestant has been barred from entering China to take part in this year’s pageant in the southern island province of Hainan.
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“He’s scared to get on the phone with me”, she said.
Lin said in her statement, “Hundreds of thousands of peaceful and law-abiding people have been imprisoned and tortured, and many have died or disappeared in custody after they refused to renounce their beliefs and swear allegiance to the Communist Party”. In the post, Lin writes about why she wants to participate in the competition so badly, how she came to Falun Gong and what she really thinks about the Chinese government. Officials intercepted her Thursday at the Hong Kong airport en route to Sanya, where the competition was already in progress.
She is also a practitioner of Falun Gong – which is a spiritual, meditative group that is outlawed and heavily persecuted in China.
Anastassia Lin is a 25-year-old actress and University of Toronto graduate is of Chinese descent and a very vocal critic of the country.
However, she said she decided to make the trip as, unlike elsewhere in China, citizens from 21 countries, including Canada, are eligible to get a tourist visa on arrival and stay for up to 15 days in Hainan, an island province best known for its beach resorts. In an email, François 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.
Arriving in Hong Kong for a 12-hour layover on Thursday, she said she had tremendous bouts of nervousness, exacerbated by the update that a Chinese embassy official in Ottawa implicitly told The Globe and Mail that the country considered her persona non grata.
Canada’s China-born Miss World contestant was stopped in Hong Kong on Thursday and denied permission to board a flight to the beauty pageant finals in China, a move she said, was punishment for speaking out against human rights abuses in the country.
She told United States lawmakers she “wanted to speak for those in China that are beaten, burned and electrocuted for holding to their beliefs – people in prison who eat rotten food with blistered fingers because they dare have convictions”. Lin said in Hong Kong.
Lin said that after she won the Canadian title, mainland security agents visited her father, who still lives in China, in an apparent attempt to intimidate her into silence.
Lin said the Chinese government uses the threat of visa denials to punish dissidents with “unapproved views, and to bring academics and journalists to heel”. When I was a child growing up in China, my job as a student council president involved enforcing ideological purity among my classmates, organizing them to watch Communist propaganda.
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Earlier this month, Lin was a guest speaker at an event advocating for religious freedom in China organized by the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based pro-democracy British think tank.
