Miss World Canada, Anastasia Lin, has been barred from entering China ahead of the Miss World pageant taking place in Hainan.
The 25-year-old actress is a vocal critic of China’s religious policies and a practitioner of the meditative religion Falun Gong, which is banned in China since 1999.
Lin was unable to board a connecting flight from Hong Kong after Chinese authorities made it known over the telephone that her visa request would be denied upon arrival.
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“If they start to censor beauty pageants how pathetic is that?” Lin told the Associated Press in Hong Kong. The University of Toronto graduate also took to Twitter to share her disappointment. “I’m in Hong Kong, but the Chinese government has barred me from getting the next flight to Sanya for Miss World,” she tweeted alongside the hashtag #AfraidofABeautyQueen.
“China does not allow any persona non grata to come to China,” Yang Yundong, a rep for the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, told the Globe And Mail. While he did not single out the beauty pageant winner by name, the spokesman added, “I simply do not understand why some people pay special attention to this matter and have raised it repeatedly.”
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Unlike her fellow pageant contestants, Lin had never received an invitation letter from the Chinese government before leaving for Miss World.
“I was never given an explanation as to why I did not receive the letter. Under Chinese law, however, Canadian citizens are eligible to obtain a landing visa upon arrival in Sanya, so I decided to try attending anyway,” she posted on Facebook. “Unfortunately, I was prevented from boarding the plane from Hong Kong to Sanya. No reasons was[sic] given [for] the denial.”
She continued, “The slogan of the Miss World competition is: ‘Beauty with a purpose’. My purpose is to advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves – those who suffer in prisons and labor camps, or whose voices have been stifled by repression and censorship.”
Most recently, Lin also claimed that Chinese authorities visited her father, who still lives in Hunan, China, in an attempt to intimidate her family.
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