And last week, when a State Department official requested a meeting with Ms. Lin, to discuss the continuing harassment of her father in China, pageant executives refused to let her go, a State Department official said. They relented only after Ms. Lin agreed to be accompanied by a pageant employee, who insisted on attending the meeting. The chaperone later turned down a State Department request to post a photo of the meeting on Twitter. 
 
 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, but friends say they have little doubt about its motivations: Pageant officials, they said, 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 at 13. 
 
 Since 2003, the Miss World pageant has been held six times in Sanya, a tropical city in southern China, and Chinese companies have become the main sponsors of the decades-old competition. The local government has spent $31 million to upgrade infrastructure for the competition, according to the Chinese media. 
 
 Last year, after the Chinese authorities refused to issue Ms. Lin a visa to attend the finals, she flew to Hong Kong, hoping to obtain a visa at the border. She was turned away, and her photo disappeared from the pageant’s official website. “Why is a powerful country like China so afraid of a beauty queen?” she said at the time. ||||| Outspoken Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin will host a screening of 'The Bleeding Edge' in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night. 
 
 Canada's China-born Miss World contestant Anastasia Lin has won her bid to attend the U.S. premiere of an indie movie she stars in after organizers earlier claimed the beauty queen had been denied permission by the Miss World Organization. 
 
 A representative for Lin in Toronto confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter that the reigning Miss World Canada and Toronto-based actress will be on hand in Washington, D.C. for the Wednesday night screening of The Bleeding Edge, a thriller about forced human organ harvesting in China by award-winning director Leon Lee. 
 
 Lin's reps signaling she will attend follows the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which is organizing the film screening, on Tuesday claiming the London-based Miss World Organization imposed a "gag order" on the beauty queen because of her longstanding activism against religious persecution in China. 
 
 That was followed by Julia Morley, chair and CEO of the Miss World Organization, telling the Hollywood Reporter that Lin had always been free to attend the U.S. premiere, and had never made a personal request to do so. 
 
 The Canadian-made film, in which Lin plays a mother and Falun Gong practitioner jailed and tortured in a Chinese labor camp, will screen tonight ahead of Sunday's Miss World pageant finals in Washington in which Lin will represent Canada. 
 
 Morley said she would personally ask the Miss World beauty queen on Wednesday if she wanted to attend the screening. "Ms Lin has not been blocked from anything. She is a free person to do exactly what she wishes to do," Morley said in an emailed statement to the Hollywood Reporter. 
 
 The Bleeding Edge was financed by Canadian tax credits and industry subsidies received after Lee earned a Peabody Award for his 2014 documentary Human Harvest, about illegal organ harvesting in China. 
 
 This is not the first time Canadians have been subject to apparent pressure from Chinese authorities over films about the banned Falun Gong. The CBC in 2007 pulled a documentary that probed Falun Gong persecution in China after receiving protests from Chinese diplomats and ahead of the public network's broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics from Beijing. 
 
 Lin's other movie credits include the thriller Destined, directed by Ray Yuan and Xinyu Wang, and Red Lotus, a short film for Swedish television by Fenix Film that has the Canadian actress playing a young woman jailed for her Falun Gong ties. 
 
 Dec. 14, 10:45 am., 4:30 p.m. Updated with comments by Miss World Organization chair Julia Morley on Anastasia Lin and her The Bleeding Edge film premiere, and confirmation that Lin will attend film screening. ||||| Two years ago, the Miss World pageant announced an end to the swimsuit competition that had long been a mainstay of the annual extravaganza. Miss World’s chairman, Julia Morley, explained at the time that the decision reflected the organization’s great respect for the contestants’ minds. 
 
 “I don’t need to see women just walking up and down in bikinis,” Morley said in an interview with Elle. “I don’t care if someone has a bottom two inches bigger than someone else’s. We are really not looking at her bottom. We are really listening to her speak.” 
 
 The words were admirable. The reality is rather different. 
 
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 Just ask Anastasia Lin. 
 
 In a column 10 days ago, I wrote about Lin, a Chinese-Canadian actress who is also the reigning Miss World Canada. For the second consecutive year, Lin has been named to represent her country in the pageant final — a platform she sought to raise global awareness of a cause that touches her deeply: China’s merciless persecution of prisoners of conscience. 
 
 Lin, who was born in Hunan province, was reared to believe in the absolute authority of the Communist Party and its teachings. As a student leader in grade school, she spread government propaganda that demonized practitioners of Falun Gong, a gentle meditation discipline rooted in Buddhist teachings of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Only after emigrating to Canada as a teenager did Lin discover the truth: Falun Gong practitioners, far from being a dangerous cult, are victimized by a dangerous regime, which tortures and kills them by the tens of thousands — many via the ghastly crime of forcibly harvesting their vital organs for transplantation into patients with cash or political connections. 
 
 Over time, Lin became outspoken on the subject of human rights in China. She played the lead in movies highlighting Chinese repression, most recently Leon Lee’s award-winning “The Bleeding Edge.” And she entered the Miss World round of beauty pageants in order to convey her message through a different venue. 
 
 The Chinese government barred Lin from competing in the 2015 Miss World pageant final, which was held in the resort city of Sanya, on China’s Hainan island. But the heavy-handed attempt to deny Lin a world stage backfired spectacularly. The media were captivated by the charismatic Canadian who spoke so feelingly about the suffering of China’s prisoners of conscience. She was offered opportunities to speak about human rights in China in many venues, including the Oxford Union, Washington’s National Press Club, and the Oslo Freedom Forum. 
 
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 Still, her overriding goal remained the stage of the Miss World pageant, which draws an international television audience of more than 1 billion viewers. And with the Miss World final being broadcast this year from Washington, on Dec. 18, Lin expected no impediment to her ability to speak freely about repression in China. 
 
 But the Miss World Organization, it appears, has no intention of allowing Lin to say anything that China’s government finds objectionable. 
 
 I called Lin in Toronto a month ago, proposing that I meet her in Washington for an interview during the contestants’ three-week stay there. She readily agreed, asking only that I arrange the interview through official Miss World channels, as the pageant’s detailed regulations specify. My repeated requests to Miss World, however, went unacknowledged. Morley may claim that “really listening to her speak” is what Miss World wants for each contestant. Yet for weeks the organization stonewalled numerous inquiries from news organizations wanting to listen to Lin. 
 
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 I went to Washington anyway and approached Lin in the lobby of her hotel. She agreed to talk for a few minutes, but only on the condition that we sit in the lobby, openly, hiding nothing from anyone. 
 
 “I’m trying to play by the book,” she said. She couldn’t imagine that pageant officials would want to keep her from advancing her purpose: freedom and dignity for Chinese prisoners of conscience. “I don’t care about all this — the hair, the dresses,” she said. “I just want to get to that stage and be the voice for people who are silenced.” 
 
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 Moments later, it was Lin who was silenced. A Miss World employee saw us talking, and demanded an explanation. I began to answer, but Lin cut me off with the unvarnished truth: “This is a writer from The Boston Globe who came down to Washington to talk to me.” The employee instantly called in reinforcements. Soon there were three officials. Two of them hustled Lin from the lobby, angrily accusing her of breaching the rules and causing trouble. 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. 
 
 For the second year, Lin has been named to represent her country in the Miss World final. 
 
 The Miss World contest has deep ties to China. Since 2003, the pageant has been hosted in Sanya six times. Miss World has collected millions of dollars in license fees paid by the Chinese municipality, and reaps millions more from its lucrative broadcast contracts. According to the Miss World website, the 2016 pageant’s “Sponsors and Partners” are all affiliates of a Chinese company. 
 
 “Miss World’s finances have always been something of a mystery,” Richard Macauley and Heather Timmons reported in Quartz last year. What isn’t a mystery is that a lot of its money comes from China — and Chinese money talks. “Beauty with a Purpose” is a noble mission. But that mission has a way of being aborted when a Miss World contestant is at odds with Beijing. Even in a hotel in Washington, D.C. 
 
 Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby
– "Why is a powerful country like China so afraid of a beauty queen?" Anastasia Lin asked in 2015 after the country denied her a visa to keep her from competing in the annual Miss World pageant being held there. The New York Times reports the 26-year-old Canadian beauty queen has rubbed China the wrong way because she uses her platform to speak out against the country's human rights abuses. “I don’t care about all this—the hair, the dresses,” Lin tells the Boston Globe. “I just want to get to that stage and be the voice for people who are silenced.” But now family and friends say Lin is the one being silenced, threatened with being booted from the 2016 Miss World pageant—funded largely by Chinese companies despite being held in the US this year—if she continues to speak her mind. Moments after Lin gave the Globe the above quote, pageant officials broke up the interview. And sources tell the Hollywood Reporter that Miss World has turned down requests from the AP, Times, and Reuters to interview Lin. After a State Department official requested to meet with Lin, Miss World reportedly insisted on a pageant chaperone. Lin, also an actor, is the star of The Bleeding Edge, a film about China harvesting organs from members of a banned religious group that is premiering in the US on Wednesday. Organizers of the premiere say Miss World is banning her from attending. The head of the Miss World pageant denies any sort of "gag order" on Lin, saying she's free to attend events and speak with anyone she wishes.