Canada's outspoken Miss World contestant said she was barred Thursday from entering China to take part in this year's pageant in the southern island province of Hainan. Chinese-born Anastasia Lin said she was unable to board her connecting flight from Hong Kong after a Chinese official told her by telephone that she would not be granted a visa on arrival. Lin is an outspoken critic of Chinese religious policy and a follower of the Falun Gong meditation practice, which was outlawed by China's ruling Communist Party in 1999. Although she hadn't received an invitation letter from pageant organizers, and therefore was unable to obtain a Chinese visa, she said she decided to travel to China anyway in hopes of obtaining a visa on arrival. "If they start to censor beauty pageants—how pathetic is that?" Lin told the AP in Hong Kong.
Lin, who moved to Canada from China when she was 13, told a US 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 25-year-old actress also plays an imprisoned Falun Gong practitioner in an upcoming Canadian movie, The Bleeding Edge. 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. "The Chinese government has barred me from the competition for political reasons," Lin said in a prepared pre-departure statement. "They are trying to punish me for my beliefs and prevent me from speaking out about human rights issues." (More China stories.)
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