Anastasia Lin, Miss World Canada, in 2015. PHOTO: CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGES)
If Donald Trump wants China to know there’s a new sheriff in town, he has a chance to make the point this week using one of his favorite things: a beauty pageant. One of the contestants in the Miss World finale this weekend in Washington, D.C., is a Chinese-born actress and human-rights activist whom Beijing wants to silence into obscurity. Her name is Anastasia Lin, and Mr. Trump should ask to meet with her.
Ms. Lin, 26, is the reigning Miss Canada, a post she uses to highlight victims of state abuse in her homeland, which she left at age 13. She focuses especially on the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who have been imprisoned, tortured or killed for practicing Falun Gong, the Buddhist-inspired spiritual discipline that drew millions of adherents in the 1990s before the government banned it as a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. A Falun Gong practitioner herself, Ms. Lin has made movies, written articles and lobbied Western governments about her cause.
This activism cost her the chance to compete in last year’s Miss World, because it was held in China, which has hosted the festivities seven times in recent years as part of a broad push for cultural cachet and “soft power.” Rather than let Ms. Lin on stage, Beijing denied her a visa, denounced her in state media and threatened her father, who still lives in China, causing him to cut off contact with her. The London-based Miss World Organization refused to back Ms. Lin, presumably to keep favor with its sponsors—all of whom are Chinese, according to its website.
Canada thankfully has more principled pageant officials, who let Ms. Lin keep her crown so that she could compete this year. But Beijing appears to be trying to keep her quiet even in Washington.
According to my sources, the Miss World officials who field Ms. Lin’s interview requests have ignored a litany of queries from major outlets, in addition to my own. When she sat down recently at a pageant venue with the Boston Globe, a Miss World official aggressively interrupted them, stopped the interview and warned Ms. Lin that she could be removed from the pageant for any further contact with journalists.
Until it relented Wednesday under criticism, Miss World had barred Ms. Lin from attending that night’s U.S. premiere (hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation) of “The Bleeding Edge,” in which she stars as a Falun Gong practitioner brutally tortured in a Chinese prison. A pageant official also insisted on attending her meeting last week with David Saperstein, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Afterward the handler urged Mr. Saperstein’s office not to tweet about the meeting—a move that may be especially galling to the famously Twitter-savvy president-elect.
Miss World is a private organization that can do what it wants. But seeking to silence a brave beauty queen doesn’t have to be cost-free for the pageant or for China.
Donald Trump is a master at pinpointing the vulnerabilities of his rivals, and it doesn’t take a genius to see which issues Beijing doesn’t want to be called out on. They’re the ones it spends so much time and effort seeking to squash through censorship and intimidation at home and overseas. Like the testimony of Anastasia Lin.
Mr. Feith is a Journal editorial writer based in Hong Kong.
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