Chinese media blasted this year's Miss Canada on Monday over her claim that Beijing froze her out of an international beauty pageant due to her outspoken views on human rights. Officials in Hong Kong last week stopped Anastasia Lin from boarding a plane bound for the southern Chinese city of Sanya, where the Miss World finals will be held in December, telling her she would not receive a visa.
The 25-year old actress claims the decision was due to her stance on China's human rights record, including its persecution of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual group of which she is a practitioner. "Lin has to pay a cost for being tangled with hostile forces against China", said the Global Times in an editorial by Shan Renping, a pen name for the editor of the newspaper, which has close ties to China's ruling Communist Party. The actress, the paper added, cannot expect to "play up to her circle in Canada through defaming China and then strive to reach the broad mainland market".