TORONTO — Clasping hands with youngsters in red Communist Youth League scarves, contestants from more than 110 nations descended on the southern Chinese island of Hainan this week for the 65th annual Miss World contest.
But one contestant was absent from the opening ceremony: Miss Canada, otherwise known as Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old actress and classically trained pianist who has been denied a Chinese visa to attend the monthlong pageant, presumably because of her outspoken advocacy for human rights and religious freedom in China.
After waiting in vain for weeks, Lin packed up her Canadian-designed eveningwear on Wednesday and quietly boarded a Hong Kong-bound flight with the hope she might obtain an on-demand visa at the border and perhaps slip unnoticed into China.
It was not to be.
The Chinese authorities, tipped off to her arrival, barred her from flying onward to Hainan.
Speaking by telephone from Hong Kong on Thursday, Lin said she was angry and disappointed but not entirely surprised. "I have every right to be at that event," she said. "It's kind of sad. I mean, I'm just an acting student and a beauty queen. What could they possibly be so afraid of?"
Lin, it turns out, has become Beijing's worst nightmare. A Chinese émigré who moved to Canada as an adolescent, she is a practitioner of Falun Gong, the Buddhism-inspired spiritual movement that China has deemed an "evil cult." She is also charismatic, canny and media-savvy.
Despite threats to family members in China, she has refused to back away from her official pageant platform of speaking out about human-rights abuses in the country of her birth.
Her David-and-Goliath clash with the Chinese government has drawn sympathetic media attention and legions of supporters around the world, providing her an even bigger platform to speak out about the imprisonment and torture Falun Gong adherents face in China.
"If I don't speak out for what's right, it will send out a terrible message to those who experience China's fear and intimidation and don't have the ability to fight back," she said in a recent interview in Toronto.
Lin's confrontation with Beijing highlights the contradictory impulses of Chinese leaders: The desire to silence critics both influential and insignificant, and the yearning to be a respected world power.
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment on Lin's visa application but issued a statement Thursday saying "China welcomes all lawful activities organized in China by international organizations or agencies, including the Miss World pageant. But China does not allow any persona non grata to come to China."
As China's economic and diplomatic stature has grown, so, too, has its ability to project its influence well beyond its borders. Hollywood, eager to gain access to China's vast market, has altered film scripts to please China's censors, and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has been widely criticized at home for seeking to curry favor with Beijing by avoiding public discussion of China's human-rights abuses.
Minxin Pei, an expert in Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said Beijing has become increasingly successful in bending others to its will.
"Chinese leaders are realists and they know that people will hold their noses and continue to kowtow to them because they have a big checkbook," he said. "The way they are treating Anastasia Lin is part of a larger strategy for deterring would-be critics: The proverbial slaughter of the chicken that is killed to frighten all those monkeys."
Lin, however, refuses to be a chicken. In May, days after winning the Miss Canada contest in Vancouver, she says security agents visited her father, who remains in China, and urged him to rein in his daughter's talk about human rights.
.Although Lin has earned widespread support from her fellow Canadians, she has been disappointed by the silence from the government of Justin Trudeau, who was elected prime minister last month. 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.
The Miss World Organization, whose motto is "beauty with a purpose," has also refused to publicly advocate on her behalf, though Lin says pageant officials have offered to allow her to compete in next year's finals.
Officials with the London-based organization did not return phone messages and emails seeking comment. On Thursday, Lin's photo was conspicuously absent from the organization's online roster of Miss World contestants.
"They're just going to hang me out to dry," Lin said.