Miss World Pageant Silences Beauty Queen. After the Chinese authorities blocked the Canadian beauty queen Anastasia Lin from attending the 65th annual Miss World pageant in China last year, the event’s organizers promised to allow her a chance to compete in the 2016 finals, which are currently underway in suburban Washington. They however did not inform Ms Anastasia that she could smile but not speak out publicly through out the event.

Miss World Pageant Silences Beauty Queen : Anastasia Lin in Toronto last year. The Chinese authorities later blocked her from attending the Miss World pageant in China. Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times

Over the past three weeks, as she and her fellow contestants have rehearsed for Tuesday’s finale, Ms. Lin, 26 has been barred from speaking to the news media, friends and relatives said.

They said that officials with the London-based pageant have also refused to allow Ms. Lin to attend the American premiere of a movie in which she appears. The film, “The Bleeding Edge,” has angered Beijing with its dramatization of what human rights advocates describe as government-run programs that harvest the organs of Chinese prisoners of conscience.

According to a State Department official when they requested a meeting with Ms. Lin, to discuss the continuing harassment of her father in China, the pageant executives refused to let her go. They relented only after Ms. Lin agreed to be accompanied by a pageant employee who insisted on attending the meeting.

Jacob Wallenberg, a friend who has spoken to Ms. Lin by phone, said pageant employees warned her that she would be ejected from the competition if she spoke to reporters. “They have specifically told her not to talk about human rights during the pageant, even though that is her official platform,” he said. “She is very frustrated.”

The Miss World organization declined to answer questions about the restrictions it has placed on Ms. Lin. Pageant officials say they are simply doing the bidding of the Chinese government, which has spent the past year trying to silence Ms. Lin, who was born in China but emigrated to Canada when she was 13 years old.

Beijing’s efforts to silence Ms. Lin appear to have had the opposite effect. In the year since she was barred from the competition, she has been invited to speak at Oxford University, the National Press Club in Washington and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Miss World Pageant Silences Beauty Queen

Ms. Lin has been especially outspoken on the repression of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in mainland China. Ms. Lin is a practitioner of Falun Gong, which the Chinese government has deemed “an evil cult.”

The Miss World Organization have been aggressive in its effort to prevent reporters from speaking to Ms. Lin. Two weeks ago, pageant officials interrupted an interview she was giving to Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, at a Washington-area hotel. “Two of them hustled Lin from the lobby, angrily accusing her of breaching the rules and causing trouble,” he wrote. “The third blocked me from talking to Lin, and assured me that my interview would be scheduled the next day. It wasn’t, of course.”

Source: nytimes.com