Barbaric Men of Asia

The ugly truth about China’s organ harvesting
By Anastasia Lin

Actress/Beauty Queen Anastasia Lin denounces Chinese Organ Harvesting

The verdict is in: On June 17, the China Tribunal announced its finding that China’s Communist regime has for two decades practiced systematic, forced organ removal from prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun Gong practitioners and Muslims.
The independent, London-based panel of international legal and medical experts was led by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who also headed the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
After unwilling donors are executed, the tribunal found, their organs are sold to Chinese or foreign “transplant tourists.” 

Before 2015, China, whose Confucian value system considers it important to keep the body ­intact after death, had no voluntary organ-transplant system. 

Yet Chinese hospitals perform some 60,000 to 90,000 transplant surgeries each year.
Chinese hospitals promise that they can deliver hearts, livers, kidneys and corneas of matching blood type and size in two weeks. 

The surgeries can be scheduled in advance, which suggests hospitals know exactly when the “donors” are going to die.  

By contrast, America has a highly developed voluntary organ-donation system, and recipients typically have to wait hundreds of days.
According to researchers, Chinese prison authorities subject detained Falun Gong practitioners to medical exams to determine the health of their organs (even as they routinely torture these same prisoners). 

Detained Uighur Muslims report similar medical examinations.
The tribunal also heard from Chinese medical personnel who have defected from the regime. 

They warned Western governments and medical practitioners of this ongoing atrocity.
It wasn’t easy. 

One researcher likened his work to examining the scene following a nuclear explosion. 

Chinese government agencies and hospitals never provide honest numbers, so investigators have to make inferences from evidence such as hospital-renovation notices, patient turnover rates and medical research papers to estimate how many transplants are performed at each hospital.
Beijing deletes all traces of evidence online, making preservation of available records vitally important to rights researchers.
I first grappled seriously with this issue when I starred in the 2016 film “The Bleeding Edge.” 

I played a ­Falun Gong practitioner imprisoned for her beliefs, who is tied to an operating table as her vital organs are removed to be sold for profit.
I later joined these courageous researchers and campaigners. 

We testified at legislative hearings to push for laws prohibiting foreigners from going to China for transplants and banning Chinese medical and police personnel from visiting the West.
It was an uphill battle. 

Although Israel and Taiwan both passed laws making it harder for their citizens to obtain transplants in China, other democratic governments were reluctant to acknowledge this crime against humanity, perhaps ­because doing so would imply an obligation to act immediately.
China launches vicious ad hominem attacks against critics, to undermine our credibility. 

Numerous screenings of my film, and of documentaries on the subject, have been canceled on university campuses and elsewhere following phones calls from Chinese diplomats.
A year ago I was booked to discuss organ harvesting on a prominent Western public broadcaster. 

A producer canceled the interview hours before I was due to go on air. 

My representative was told the order came from “higher up” and that my “affiliations” had disqualified me from talking on live TV. 

China’s state-run media called me a tool of a “cult” working with “anti-China forces” to spread lies.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered and had their organs harvested since the practice was industrialized in 2000. 

The victims were Chinese citizens who wanted nothing more than to practice their beliefs in peace. Instead, they were killed by their government on an industrial scale.
For those of us who have fought to expose this crime against humanity, the tribunal’s verdict is an answer to a prayer. 

We had presented the free world with mounds of evidence but were repeatedly dismissed. 

How many crimes did China’s global partners ignore, because the truth was inconvenient? 

Now that the China Tribunal has concluded that organ harvesting is happening on a massive scale, and systematically documented the practice, there is no excuse left for inaction.

Rogue Nation

How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies
By FRANK LANGFITT

Tibetans cheer on a Tibetan team at a soccer tournament in London. Fans say they were pleased and surprised that the tournament organizers didn't succumb to pressure from potential sponsors and dump the Tibetan team to avoid angering the Chinese government.

It used to be that the Communist Party focused on censoring free speech primarily inside of China. 

In recent years, though, China's authoritarian government has tried to censor speech beyond its borders, inside liberal democracies, when speech contradicts the party's line on highly sensitive political issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan. 

It's part of the party's grand strategy to change the way the world talks about China.
The Chinese government has been so effective at intimidating Western businesses on this front that companies do the party's work for it. 

That's what happened in London this summer at an obscure soccer tournament modeled on the World Cup. 

The teams were drawn from a hodgepodge of minority peoples, isolated territories and would-be nations, including Tibet.
Some potential corporate sponsors were queasy.
"There were inquiries made as to whether we would consider removing Tibet from the competition," said Paul Watson, commercial director for the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, which ran the tournament. 

Watson spoke with one potential sponsor who was apologetic but direct.
"Look, I took this to my boss," Watson recalled the sponsor telling him. 

"It's Tibet. Can you get them out of there? I'm really sorry. It's a terrible thing to ask. We love what you do, but would you remove Tibet?"
Watson refused to dump the Tibetans, which he said cost CONIFA more than $100,000 in sponsorship money. 

Watson said no one from the Chinese government ever approached him, but they didn't have to, because the sponsors already knew the risks.
Tibet is a colony of China, but Tibetans hate Chinese rule because the Chinese are trying to destroy Tibetan spiritual and cultural identity, not only at home, but also abroad. 

Potential sponsors were worried about offending Beijing because they'd already seen how other companies were punished when they didn't follow China's official line. 

In January, authorities suspended Marriott's Chinese website after the hotel group mistakenly referred to Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau as countries. 

The next month, Mercedes-Benz was forced to apologize for quoting the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, on Instagram.
"Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.
Watson said potential sponsors were terrified that if they backed the tournament, they'd be in a business meeting in China a few months later, staring at a photo of their company's logo next to Tibetan soccer players and the Tibetan flag.
"It could be a deal-breaker," Watson said.

Potential sponsors urged the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, CONIFA, to drop a Tibetan team from a soccer tournament in London for fear of offending the Chinese government.

Tibetans in London who turned out to root for their team were grateful and surprised that CONIFA stood up for them.
"It's very rare these days that you see people sticking to such principles," said Pema Yoko, a former official with Students for a Free Tibet, "but the more you allow yourself to bend down to China, the more China is going to bully."
The Communist Party has spent years trying to control the country's narrative and influence how the world talks about China. 

Between the Opium War in 1840 and the Communist victory in 1949, foreign powers including Japan and the United Kingdom controlled pieces of Chinese territory during a period the party refers to as the "Century of Humiliation."
"One of the contexts for the obsessive way in which Chinese officials can sometimes think about the way that China is portrayed overseas is the fact that, from the mid-19th century to well into the 20th century, China was not in control of its own destiny," said Rana Mitter, a China scholar at Oxford University.
The recent economic boom, which vaulted China from a backward, agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse and the world's second-largest economy, changed all that.
"These days China is in a much better position to actually spread [its] narrative," said Mitter, "with, we might say, a much louder megaphone."
When groups or institutions in the West don't toe Beijing's line, the Chinese government is now more willing to use its muscle to enforce its views.
Last year, the Durham University students' union organized a debate on whether China was a threat to the West. 

Tom Harwood, then president of the union, said the school's Chinese Students and Scholars Association complained about the topic and pressed him to drop one of the speakers, Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada. 

Lin is also a human rights activist and a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation group banned by the Chinese government.

A Chinese Embassy official in London urged the Durham University students' union to drop Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada and a human rights activist, from a debate on whether China is a threat to the West.

"Actually, it got to the point where the Chinese embassy phoned up our office and started questioning us a lot about the debate, asking if we could not invite Anastasia Lin," Harwood recalled. 

"It even got to the point where one of the officials at the embassy suggested that if this debate went ahead, the U.K. might get less favorable trade terms after Brexit."
In March, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union, a giant market of more than 500 million consumers. 

British officials are desperate to ink new free trade deals with major economies, including China. Harwood was stunned that a Chinese diplomat would suggest that the United Kingdom might pay a financial price for something as small as a college debate.
"It's just quite shocking that within an institution that was 175 years old, that's prided itself on hosting free speech, free exchange, free debate, that an outside influence was trying to change that or try and stop us hosting a speaker," said Harwood.
Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. 

He didn't think much of China's tactics.
"I thought it was pathetic," Rifkind said. 

"It's something that the Chinese very foolishly do again and again."

Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. Rifkind served as foreign secretary in the lead-up to the return of the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Rifkind said that a couple of decades earlier, when China was much weaker and its economy much smaller, it was easy to ignore such complaints. 

Rifkind served as Britain's foreign secretary as the country prepared to return the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997. 

At the time, the United Kingdom's economy was bigger than China's. 

When the Dalai Lama asked to meet Rifkind, about a year before the handover, he didn't hesitate.
"They spluttered," Rifkind recalled. 

"They complained. They said it was inappropriate, but nothing more than that happened because, at that time, they didn't have the diplomatic weight they have today."
Flash-forward to 2012 when then-British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in public in London. 

China's economy was now more than three times the size of the United Kingdom's. 

Beijing responded by canceling meetings and freezing out British officials. 

In 2015, Cameron refused to meet the Dalai Lama, who told The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, "Money, money, money. That's what this is about. Where is morality?"

The Chinese government no longer just tries to punish the West for straying from the Communist Party line. 

In the past year, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has gone further, arguing that China's authoritarian system can serve as a model for others, an alternative to liberal democracy.
Jan Weidenfeld, who runs the European China Policy unit at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank, says the party's argument runs like this: "Look at where democracy has gotten you? Lots of irrational decisions. You got Donald Trump in the White House. You've got Brexit and we've just got the better model here."
Weidenfeld says Beijing's goal is to undermine support for the Western system and wage a broader battle of systemic competition — something that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Clumsy attempts to censor people — as in the case of the Durham University debate — have backfired, but China has had success pressuring businesses, as the apologies by Marriott and Mercedes-Benz show.
Benedict Rogers, deputy chair of the Conservative Party's Human Rights Commission, said the willingness of some in the West to knuckle under to the Communist Party is part of the problem. 

Rogers said that a Chinese Embassy official called a member of Parliament last year to try to prevent a conservative website from publishing an article Rogers was writing about China's repressive policies in Hong Kong on the 20th anniversary of the handover. 

Rogers said that five or 10 years ago, the embassy would've never had the guts to try that.
"China has been emboldened by our weakness over recent years," Rogers said. 

"Actually, if we'd taken a stronger stand a few years ago, they perhaps wouldn't have been doing this kind of thing now."

China's State Gangsterism

Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

By Alexandra Ma
The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to suppress ideas that could undermine the sweeping authority it has over its 1.4 billion citizens — and the state can go to extreme lengths to maintain its grip.
In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.
Even leaving China isn't always enough. 

The state has continued to clamp down on dissent by harassing and threatening family members who remain in the country.
Scroll down to see what China can do to people who criticize it.

1. Make you disappear.Li Wenzu holds a photo of her husband, detained human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, while protesting in front of the Supreme People's Protectorate in Beijing in July 2017.
Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defended political activists in the past, has not been seen since he was taken into detention three years ago.
He was taken away in August 2015 alongside more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists for government questioning. 

Three years later, he remains the only person in that cohort who still isn't free.
Nobody has heard from him since. 

His lawyers, friends, and family have all tried contacting him, but have consistently been denied access, Radio Free Asia reported.
The lawyer's friends and family, and other lawyers, have tried visiting him, but to no avail. 

His wife, Li Wenzu, has been routinely harassed by Chinese police for protesting Wang's detention, according to the BBC.
His wife recently received a message from a friend saying that Wang was alive and "in reasonable mental and physical health," but was denied further information when she contacted authorities.

2. Physically drag you away so you can't speak to the media.

A woman being taken away by police after she tried sharing footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing on July 26.
A woman was dragged away by men in plainclothes after she tried to share footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing with journalists on the ground in July.
As the woman was trying to share images of the scene with journalists, a group of men took her across, claiming it was a "family matter," according to Agence France-Presse reporter Becky Davis who witnessed it.
The woman claimed she didn't know any of the men. 

You can watch the whole scene unfold in this video.
China was trying to cover up news of the explosion. 

Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, reportedly wiped all posts about it in the hours following the incident, before allowing some media coverage of it later on.
While it remains unclear who the men were and why they took the woman, Davis said it is common for plainclothes police to act as "family members" and take people away.
Read more: 'I do not know that man. I didn't do anything!': A woman who tried to share footage of the explosion near Beijing's US Embassy was forced into a car and driven away

3. Put your family under house arrest, even if they haven't been accused of a crime.Portraits of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia displayed at a protest in Hong Kong in June 2017.
China has kept family members of prominent activists under house arrest to prevent them from traveling abroad and publicly protesting the regime.
In 2010 Liu Xia tried to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who at the time was imprisoned for "inciting subversion" with his protests.
She wasn't allowed to go and was placed under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance. 

She had no access to a cell phone or computer, even though she hadn't been charged with a crime.
She was allowed to leave the house in 2017 to attend the sea burial of her husband after his death from liver cancer, before being sent to the other side of the country by authorities so she wouldn't see memorials held by supporters in Beijing.
Liu Xia was detained in her house for eight years in total. 

She was released to Berlin in July after a sustained lobbying effort from the German government for Liu's release.
Still, she is not completely free: Xia is effectively prevented from appearing in public or speaking to media for fear of reprisal from Beijing. 

She fears that if she does, the government will punish her brother, who remains in Beijing, her friend Tienchi Martin-Liao told The Guardian.

4. Threaten to kill your family and forbid them from leaving China.Anastasia Lin, whose family in China is being punished for her activism against China.

Even when dissidents leave China, they are not safe. 

Chinese expats and exiles have seen family members who remained in China pay the price for their protest.
One example is Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, who repeatedly speaks out to criticise China's human rights record.
She told Business Insider earlier this year that her uncles and elderly grandparents had their visas to Hong Kong — a Chinese region that operates under a separate and independent rule of law — revoked in 2016.
Security agents also contacted Lin's father saying that if she continued to speak up, the family "would be persecuted like in the Cultural Revolution" — a bloody ten-year period under Mao Zedong when millions of Chinese people were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured.
Shawn Zhang, a student in Vancouver who has criticized Xi Jinping online, told Business Insider earlier this year that police incessantly called his parents asking them to take down his posts.
The family members of five journalists with Radio Free Asia — a US-funded media outlet — were also recently detained to stop their reporting on human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in China's East Turkestan colony.
Read more: China uses threats about relatives at home to control and silence expats and exiles abroad

5. Take down your social media posts.

A woman surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police on a smoggy day in Beijing in December 2015.

Chinese tech companies routinely delete social media posts and forbid users from posting keywords used to criticize the government.
Censorship in China has soared under Xi Jinping's presidency, with thousands of censorship directives issued every year.
Posts and keywords are usually only banned for a few hours or a few days until an event or news cycle is over.
In February, popular chat and microblogging platforms WeChat and Weibo banned users from writing posts with the letter N when it was used to criticize a plan allowing Xi to rule without term limits.
Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

6. Remove your posts from the internet — and throw you in a psychiatric ward.Dong Yaoqiong live-streaming herself defacing a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on July 4.

In July, Dong Yaoqiong live-streamed herself pouring black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, while criticizing the Communist Party's "oppressive brain control" over the country.
Hours later, she reported seeing police officers at her door and the video — which can still be seen here— was removed from her social media account.
She has not been seen in public since, although Voice of America and Radio Free Asia reported that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in her home province of Hunan, citing local activists.

7. Barge into your house to force you off the airwaves.Sun Wenguang in his home in Jinan in August 2013.
Sun Wenguang, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, was forced off air during a live phone interview with Voice of America in early August.
The 83-year-old former economics professor had been arguing that Xi Jinping had his economic priorities wrong, when up to eight policemen barged into his home, and forced him off the line.
His last words before he got cut off were: "Let me tell you, it's illegal for you to come to my home. I have my freedom of speech!" 

You can listen to the audio (in Chinese, but subtitled in English) here.
The father of Dong Yaoqiong, the woman who defaced the poster of Xi, was also interrupted while live-streaming a video calling for his daughter's release.
In the recording, which can be seen here, a man purporting to be a plain-clothed police officer can seen entering the premises, demanding to take Dong's father and his friend away, and ignoring their questions about whether the man had a search warrant.

8. Trap you in your house, and detain people who come to see you.

About 11 days after Sun Wenguang, the dissident Chinese professor, was interrupted on his call, he was found locked inside his own home.
Police had detained him in his house and Sun told two journalists who went to interview him that police forced his wife to tell people he had gone traveling to avoid suspicion.
He added: "We were taken out of our residence for 10 days and stayed at four hotels. Some of the rooms had sealed windows. It was a dark jail. After we were back, they sent four security guys to sleep in our home."
The journalists, from the US government-funded Voice of America, were detained immediately after the interview. 

Their whereabouts are not clear at this point.
Read more: A renegade Chinese professor who was forced off-air while criticizing the government was locked in his apartment and told to make up a story that he left town

9. Forbid you from leaving the country.Ai Weiwei in London in September 2015, two months after his release from China.
Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and avid critic of the Chinese government, was blocked from leaving China for four years.
Authorities claimed he was being investigated for various crimes, including pornography, bigamy, and the illicit exchange of foreign currency.
He was detained for 81 days and charged with tax evasion, for which his company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million). 

His supporters claimed the tax evasion charges were fabricated.
The government took away his passport in 2011 and refused to give it back until 2015. 

He then immediately flew to Berlin, where he now lives.

10. Intercept your protests before they even begin.Police surrounding a group of people preparing to protest in Beijing on August 6.
A group of protesters had been planning a demonstration in Beijing's financial district over lost investments with the country's peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Many of those platforms had shut down due to a recent government crackdown on financial firms, causing investors to lose some tens of thousands of dollars in savings.
But the demonstration, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday in front of China's banking regulatory commission, never materialized — because police had already rounded up the protesters and sent them home.
Many demonstrators who arrived in Beijing earlier that day found police waiting for them at their bus and train stations, before sending them away.
Peter Wang, who planned to take part in the protest, told Reuters: "Once the police checked your ID cards and saw your petition materials, they knew you are here looking to protect your [financial] rights. Then they put you on a bus directly."
Becky Davis, AFP's reporter in Beijing, described seeing more than 120 buses parked nearby to take the protesters away.
Other protesters seen traveling from their home towns to Beijing to take part in the demonstration were forced to give their fingerprints and blood samples, and prevented from traveling to the capital, Reuters said.
Activists told The Globe and Mail that the police found out about the protest by monitoring their conversations on WeChat.

Activists say we are now seeing 'human rights violations not seen in decades' in ChinaSurveillance cameras in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2009.

China has a long history of suppressing dissenting views and actions. 

But Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the number of people being targeted and the extent of their punishment has worsened under Xi's rule.
"While life for peaceful critics in modern China has never been easy, there have been times of relative latitude," she told Business Insider.
"Eleven's tenure is most certainly not one of those times — not just in the numbers of people being targeted, but in the use of harsh charges and long sentences, and in the state's adoption of rights-gutting laws.
"Add to that the alarming expansion of high-tech surveillance and mass arbitrary detentions across East Turkestan, and you've got a scale of human rights violations we have not seen in decades."
The United Nations recently accused China of holding one million Uighurs in internment camps in the western colony of East Turkestan. 


Does the Chinese Communist Party care that people know what's going on?
Probably not.

Richardson said: "The Chinese communists will keep treating people however badly they want unless the price for doing so is made too high for them — clearly this calculus finally changed recently for them with respect to Liu Xia," referring to the activist's wife who was released to Beijing after eight years of house arrest.
"That's why relentless public and private interventions on behalf of those unjustly treated is critical — to keep driving up the cost of abuses many people inside and outside China find unacceptable," Richardson added.
But there's a catch, says Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders. 

While the Party has released political activists due to public pressure in the past, it has kept family members in China to make sure the activists don't speak out.
Eve told The Guardian in July: "The Chinese Communist Party has become more immune to international pressure to release activists and let them go overseas, coinciding with its growing economic clout.
"Nowadays, on the rare occasion it does allow an activist to go abroad, it's with the sinister knowledge that their immediate or extended family remains in China and can be used as an effective hostage to stifle their free speech."

A Chinese student’s commencement speech praising “fresh air” and democracy is riling China’s internet

Yang Shuping's time at the University of Maryland allowed her to enjoy the “fresh air of free speech.”

By Josh Horwitz

Yang Shuping's breath of fresh air. 

Every year in May a handful of commencement speeches will go viral, usually for the speaker’s sense of humor or ability to inspire.

But one graduation speech from this year is going viral in China for a different reason – it’s politically incorrect.
On May 21, Shuping Yang, a graduating senior at the University of Maryland, appeared at her school’s commencement ceremony to give an address. 

In her speech, Yang said that she once had five face masks in China due to the air pollution. 

Upon coming to the United States, she experienced “fresh air.”
People often ask me: Why did you come to the University of Maryland? 

I always answer: Fresh air. 

Five years ago, as I step off the plane from China, and left the terminal at Dallas Airport. 

I was ready to put on one of my five face masks, but when I took my first breaths of American air. 

I put my mask away. 

The air was so sweet and fresh, and utterly luxurious. 

I was surprised by this. 

I grew up in a city in China, where I had to wear a face mask every time I went outside, otherwise, I might get sick. 

However, the moment I inhaled and exhaled outside the airport, I felt free.
Yang went on to discuss how her time at the University of Maryland allowed her to enjoy the “fresh air of free speech.” 

A double-major in theater and psychology, she cited her attendance of a school production of the Anna Deveare-Smith play Twilight, which centers around the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992, as a formative experience.
“I have always had a burning desire to tell these kinds of stories, but I was convinced that only authorities on the narrative, only authorities could define the truth. However, the opportunity to immerse myself in the diverse community at the University of Maryland exposed me to various, many different perspectives on truth,” she said. 

“Democracy and freedom are the fresh air that is worth fighting for,” she added, as her speech came to a close.
Yang’s speech circulated quickly on China’s social media outlets. 

The hashtag “Exchange student says the air in the US is sweet” trended throughout the day on May 22, with many posts linking to a critical piece (link in Chinese, registration required) published by Collegedaily.cn, a Chinese-language blog serving overseas Chinese students. 

Most of the commenters lambasted Yang for her dour portrayal of China, particularly in a public forum overseas.

“The air in our country is bad, [but] this is not the problem. She is flattering Americans by saying our country is flawed. We are Chinese, between one another we can discuss what is wrong with our country, but we still love our homeland,” wrote one commenter.

Yang has since deleted her Facebook profile, along with her personal website. 

She did not respond to Quartz’s inquiries about her speech and its reception. 

The University of Maryland released the following statement:
The University believes that to be an informed global citizen it is critical to hear different viewpoints, to embrace diversity, and demonstrate tolerance when faced with views with which we may disagree. Listening to and respectfully engaging with those whom we disagree are essential skills, both within university walls and beyond.
The University proudly supports Shuping’s right to share her views and her unique perspectives and we commend her on lending her voice on this joyous occasion.
In response to Yang’s remarks, a group of Chinese students at the University of Maryland published a video describing themselves and their hometowns in China, titled “#Proud of China UMD.”
Quartz emailed the University of Maryland branch of the pro-China Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), a multi-chapter university organization for overseas Chinese students, but did not receive a reply.
American universities have welcomed a flood of students from China in recent years. 

Data from the Institute of International Education show 304,000 Chinese students attended university in the US during the 2014-2015 academic year, marking a five-fold increase from a decade prior.
Yang’s speech marks the most recent incident where Chinese students are caught in political crosshairs at overseas universities.
In February, a vandalism incident at Columbia University prompted Chinese students to make a video explaining the meaning of their Chinese names. 

Around the same time, Chinese students and alumni from the University of California, San Diego expressed disapproval of the school’s invitation of the Dalai Lama to speak at commencement. Meanwhile, at Durham University in the UK, the Chinese embassy reportedly called the school’s debate society asking it to reconsider hosting an event with Anastasia Lin, a Canadian-Chinese beauty queen and human rights activist.

Guilty by association: China targets relatives of dissident exiled in Canada

By Nathan Vanderklippe

Weidong Xie came to Canada three years from Beijing China where he was a federal judge. His son was violently detained on Dec. 31.

On the last day of 2016, Xie Cangqiong and his new wife slipped into the underground parking lot at their Beijing apartment complex, ready to go out and celebrate his grandfather’s upcoming 100th birthday.
But when they arrived at their car, they noticed something wrong. 

Their tires had been slashed. 

Moments later, men clothed in black surrounded Mr. Xie, who is 27. 

He struggled to break free and howled in pain.
In a shaky video shot by his wife, he is briefly visible, held in the air by a group of men. 

“My husband’s leg is broken,” she says. 

The two had married only a week before, on Christmas Day. 

One of the men turns to her: “We are enforcing the law. You must co-operate with us.”
Moments later, the young man was gone. 

The family was told he was taken nearly 1,300 kilometres south to Hubei province, although they have not been able to locate him at detention facilities there. 

Police say he is suspected of embezzlement.
His family believes his real crime in the eyes of Chinese authorities is being the son of Xie Weidong, 60, a former Supreme People’s Court Justice who moved to Canada in 2014 and has been an outspoken critic of China’s justice system. 

Chinese authorities accuse the elder Mr. Xie of corruption. 

But bringing him back from Toronto would also silence him.
Mr. Xie has refused, saying he will be tortured if he goes.
So authorities have targeted his relatives, a common tactic in China as escalating government attempts to quash dissent test the limits of old methods of asserting control, such as jailing and sometimes torturing those accused of crimes.

The flourishing of international travel has made it far simpler to leave China, while social media allows those outside the country to maintain connections with large numbers of people back home.
Family members still in the country are being locked up instead.
Four months ago, Mr. Xie’s sister was detained. 

Now his son. 

He fears others will follow. 

Already, relatives have been barred from leaving China, including his son’s new wife, who has been told she cannot attend overseas conferences for work.
“They are using the methods which hurt me most,” he said in an interview.
“The whole family has fallen into extreme terror. They don’t dare to even call each other. My son was arrested for no reason, and everyone in the family knows him. Are they going to be arrested next?” he said.
Mr. Xie snorts at the charges against his son, who is accused of embezzling funds from a company the younger man himself controls. 

“He has the right to allocate company assets where he wants,” he said.
But Chinese authorities appear to be employing a tactic that has become common during sweeping recent campaigns against dissidents – campaigns whose reach has, like with Mr. Xie, extended far beyond China’s borders. 

“They’re using these cruel measures to force me to go back for questioning,” Mr. Xie says.
Exacting revenge on families is a Chinese practice that dates to ancient imperial times, a system of “guilt by association” that resulted in the execution of all relatives of a guilty person.
“It’s of course completely illegal,” said Jiang Jue, a scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies criminal procedures in China. 

“There is no legal basis for such tactics.”
For someone pursued by the Chinese state, the arrest of family members can cause feelings of intense personal guilt, amplified when others discover what has happened, and public support turns into public criticism, Dr. Jiang said.
One dissident told her that the detention of a loved one “turned many people against him. They said he was a selfish man, who did not give enough consideration to his family members.”
The prevalence of such tactics in the Chinese justice system illustrates its unreliability and should serve as a warning to the Liberal government in Ottawa, which has agreed to discuss an extradition treaty with China.
In some cases, the punishment for relatives can last for years. 

Liu Xia

Liu Xia has been kept under house arrest since 2010, when her husband, activist and writer Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize. (China has imprisoned Mr. Liu.)
And the pressure can take many forms. 

Canadian Miss World beauty-pageant contestant Anastasia Lin angered China last year by criticizing its treatment of Falun Gong practitioners. 

After she went public, her father, who ran a successful business in China, watched orders dry up. Money has grown tight and he has struggled at home.
“My cousin told me that his wife left him because he can’t even pay his son’s tuition any more – it’s that bad,” Ms. Lin said. 

“My worst fear is that one day [my father] just disappears.”
Reached by telephone, Ms. Lin’s father said “Don’t call me,” and hung up.
Such tactics have also been used against some of the hundreds of human-rights lawyers and activists arrested by authorities in the past year, as Chinese despot Xi Jinping seeks to reassert the primacy of the Communist Party.
“You see the authorities acting more swiftly to prevent family members from leaving to go abroad, or harassing them so they do not speak out for their loved ones,” said Maya Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch. 

Even very young children have been harassed she said, with at least one child prevented from attending kindergarten.
“Harassment against family members is part of an intensified campaign against activists,” she said. 

“People who speak out against the government pay a huge price.”
Mr. Xie worries that his son will be detained for years, as Chinese authorities have done to You Ziqi, a Canadian woman held in Chinese custody for bribing Mr. Xie while he was a Supreme Court judge. (It is because of her confession that Chinese authorities say they want Mr. Xie to come back; she says she was tortured into admitting guilt.)
Detention of his family members “could continue as long as I refuse to go back,” Mr. Xie said. 

“If I return, it’s possible they will get released. But if I do not confess guilt, they will be arrested again.”

China has sought to force him back, issuing an Interpol red notice against him, which acts like an international arrest warrant. 

Mr. Xie has disputed that notice, but his North American lawyers have so far been unsuccessful.
He is also fighting for permanent-resident status in Canada, where the government has said he is criminally inadmissible, a decision that is now under judicial review.
Mr. Xie, meanwhile, is left trying to sort out where his own breaking point lies. 

“My father is 99 now. If they bother my father, should I give in?” he said.
The experience has left him more disillusioned about the way justice is delivered in the system where he once held a senior role, before quitting in disgust.
In China, “the law often becomes a joke,” he said.
But, he added, others have endured even harsher treatment. 

“I am not the worst. There are many more.”

The Goebbelsian Confucius

How China Is Invading Western Universities With Communist Propaganda
By Benedict Rogers 

Fifteen years ago, I travelled to Qufu, the birthplace of China’s most famous philosopher, Confucius, who lived from 551-479 BC. 

I had lived in and travelled around China, including Hong Kong, for much of the previous decade and wanted to learn more about the source of so much of Chinese culture’s ancient wisdom before returning to Britain.
I had been given a copy of The Analects of Confucius, a collection of his thoughts, by a Chinese friend. 

I smiled when I read that “while his parents are alive, the son should not go abroad to a great distance. If he does go on a long journey, he must tell his parents the definite place he is going to.” 

I was 18 when I first went to China, to spend six months teaching English in Qingdao before going to university. 

Confucius would be relieved to know that at least my parents knew.
“Neglect of moral culture, disregard for learning, reluctance to stand forward before a just cause, and failure in correcting what is wrong -- these are the things which are troubling me,” Confucius said. And today, they are troubling me too. 

In particular, in China and among those in the West who kowtow to China’s rulers.
China today is a bully, severely violating the human rights of its own people but also increasingly spreading its corrupt net around the world to silence dissent and extend its influence. 

It has done this through business, internet trolling, diplomacy and, at its most extreme, by kidnapping critics from other countries. 

But one of the most sophisticated and dangerous tools it has is the misuse of Confucius’ name.
According to an official Chinese government website, there are now 500 “Confucius Institutes” around the world - with the aim of 1,000 by 2020. 

In 2015, their budget was $310 million, and from 2006-2015 China spent $1.85 billion on Confucius Institutes. 

On the surface, these institutes exist to teach Chinese language and promote Chinese culture -- a Chinese equivalent of the British Council, American Centres or the Alliance Francaise. 

Unlike their western counterparts, however, Confucius Institutes are directly funded and controlled by the Chinese government, but embedded within universities around the world, giving China influence over the curriculum. 

Moreover, while the western equivalents, to varying degrees, exist to promote democratic values, concepts of an open society, critical thinking, the rule of law and to strengthen the capacity of civil society, Confucius Institutes are the antithesis, working to spread the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda and silence any dissenting voices.

This has now been exposed in a new documentary film, In the Name of Confucius, written and directed by Chinese-born Canadian film maker Doris Liu. 

The 52-minute film features a Chinese teacher called Sonia Zhao, who left China to take up a post with a Confucius Institute in Canada. 

“I thought the Confucius Institute was a cultural organisation,” she says. 

She quickly discovered, however, that as an employee, even in a western democratic country, she felt nervous “all the time”, worrying about whether what she might say would cause trouble. 

“I had to think twice before I said anything.”
At the heart of Sonia Zhao’s story was the fact that she is a practitioner of Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual belief that emphasises truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. 

Since 1999 Falun Gong has been very severely persecuted by the Chinese regime, because it became so popular that it was practised by an estimated 70 million people -- and for a regime nervous about any large gathering of people, this felt threatening. 

Even though Falun Gong is a peaceful spiritual movement, it was met with brutal repression, resulting in hundreds of thousands of practitioners jailed and many dying as a result of torture or as victims of China’s barbaric practice of forced organ harvesting.
“I had been hiding my belief for many years,” says Zhao on camera. 

“But I didn’t expect that going abroad, a place I thought would be free, that I’d still be restricted”. 

In a reconstruction of the moment she went through her employment contract, Zhao -- played by Chinese-born Canadian actress and prominent campaigner for human rights, Miss World Canada Anastasia Lin - discovers that the Confucius Institute prohibits teachers from being Falun Gong practitioners -- or from associating with them. 

Topics such as Tibet and Taiwan must also be avoided. 

“The Confucius Institutes have exported China’s persecution against Falun Gong to foreign countries in a hidden way,” argues Zhao.
The documentary then exposes the blatant Communist propaganda that exists in Confucius Institute literature used in schools and universities in western democracies. 

Texts promoting the teachings of Chairman Mao are being taught to children in Toronto, for example. As one parent put it, “something like this should not exist in a democratic country, pretty plain and simple”.
Yet the list continues. 

An American singer studying at the University of Michigan happily performs a Chinese song at a Confucius Institute function, with these words: “They sing about their new life, they sing about the great party. Ah, Chairman Mao! Ah, the Party! You nurture the people on this land”.
Officials in Beijing don’t make much attempt to hide the real purpose of Confucius Institutes. 

Largely independent from their host universities, these institutes are controlled from Beijing, with a constitution and bylaws drawn up by the Chinese regime with little transparency. 

Xu Lin, the Director-General of the Confucius Institute headquarters, known as ‘Hanban’, says on camera that their work is “an important part of our soft power. We want to expand China’s influence”. 

In a crude exertion of power, she adds: “The foreign universities work for us.”
The most shocking part of Doris Liu’s film is the naivity, and outright, unashamed complicity, of some western academics. 

In a shocking interview, Patricia Gartland, chair of the Coquitlam Confucius Institute, and Melissa Hyndes, chair of the local school district, extol the success of their work and are dismissive of any risks. 

“We never had any concerns of any kind,” Gartland tells Liu. 

Any controversy, she adds, is simply the result of “xenophobia”.
When Liu asks whether western academic organisations should accept funds from governments that disrespect human rights, Gartland simply disagrees with the question’s premise. 

And when a question about religious persecution in China is raised, the two Canadian education officials terminate the interview. 

The then chair of the Toronto District School Board Chris Bolton is similarly dismissive of concerns about human rights -- and when the questioning becomes a bit too uncomfortable, he asks the film maker to leave. 

If I had closed my eyes and tuned out the accents, I would of thought these three were Chinese government representatives.
The Toronto District School Board, however, was not entirely filled with pro-Beijing stooges. Confronted with the evidence, the board ultimately voted to terminate the district’s relationship with the Confucius Institute. 

Others, such as McMaster University, have done the same. 

In the United States, the American Association of University Professors have called for a re-think, citing “unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China“, and two universities, Chicago and Pennsylvania State, cut ties with Confucius Institutes -- as have at least three in Europe.
In the Name of Confucius focuses on Canada, but the problem is worldwide. 

In Britain, there are at least 29 Confucius Institutes, attached to major universities such as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cardiff and University College London. 

There are also 127 Confucius ‘classrooms’ in schools around the United Kingdom -- teaching from texts that promote the Chinese Communist Party.
And yet in an op-ed for the Times Higher Education supplement in 2015, the President of Imperial College, Alice Gast, expressed her wish for the UK’s universities to be “China’s best partners in the West”. 

The UK ranks first among European countries in welcoming this Chinese influence -- a point celebrated in China’s state media as marking a “Confucius revolution”.
Except it is not a ‘Confucius’ revolution, but the exporting of the values of a brutal, corrupt, cruel dictatorship. 

“An oppressive government,” said Confucius, “is to be feared more than a tiger”. 

We need to wake up and stop this collusion, before it is too late. 

In the Name of Confucius is a film everyone involved in China policy and education policy should watch. 

Confucius must be turning in his grave.

Beauty and the Chinese Beast

Barred from China and silenced in the US, this beauty queen isn't backing down
By James Griffiths

Anastasia Lin is barred from entering China and has been blocked from speaking out in the US.
Hong Kong -- Anastasia Lin just wanted her father to see her face.
Prevented from taking part in Miss World 2015 when China refused to allow her to enter the country, where the final was being held, she tried again this past December.
The Canadian was under no illusions about coming home with the 2016 crown. 

Getting on stage would be enough: the Miss World final is broadcast around the globe, including in her native China, where her father has been harassed and prevented from leaving.
In the end she appeared on screen for all of six seconds, during her introduction. 

For the rest of the show she was tucked away at the back of the crowd of contestants, or at the corners of the stage.
"It was really too naive to think that my father could see me," Lin said.
If she is slightly bitter, it's with good reason. 

Her sliver of screen time was bought with months of practice and rehearsal, and, most painfully for an outspoken human rights activist, her silence.
During the competition, Lin was placed under a communication blackout and forbidden from speaking to journalists, part of what analysts say is a pattern of western companies cooperating with China to silence critics overseas.
Miss World chairwoman Julia Morley said the organization did "our best to assist Miss Lin and have done absolutely nothing to prevent her doing everything she wanted to do."

Good little Communist

Chinese students wearing the uniform of the Young Pioneers.

Lin, 26, was born in China's Hunan province. 

As a child, she wore the iconic red scarf of the Young Pioneers and vowed to "struggle for the cause of Communism."
One of her duties in the state-run youth organization was to corral other children to watch propaganda broadcasts, which at the time were intently focused against Falun Gong.
The spiritual movement, which has roots in the ancient Chinese meditative martial art qigong, exploded in popularity in the 1990s, growing to an estimated 30 million members by the end of the decade, according to the US State Department.
In 1999, after upwards of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners staged a peaceful demonstration in Beijing -- the largest mass protest the Chinese capital had seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre a decade before -- the movement was banned and a brutal crackdown launched, with tens of thousands of people arrested.
Now a prominent spokeswoman against the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, Lin said she was largely unaware of the crackdown at the time. 

It wasn't until she moved to Canada at age 13 that she "learned that what were told in China was completely different to reality."

Contestants on stage during Miss World 2016 in Washington DC.
Speaking out
"I didn't start as an activist at all," Lin said.
As a teenager, she was focused on acting and modeling, eventually studying theater at the University of Toronto.
It was there that she was approached by a Chinese producer who was looking for someone to play the role of a student killed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. 

Thousands of children died during the disaster, as shoddily built schools collapsed on top of them.
"He said they couldn't find anyone to play this role, because it was too sensitive," Lin said. 

"I jumped on the opportunity."
Similar offers quickly followed: "At one point I really had a monopoly on these types of roles."
At the same time, she began competing in beauty pageants to raise her profile and get on-camera experience. 

She placed third in Miss World Canada in 2013, going on to win the competition outright in 2015.
That's when the trouble started.

Miss World contestant denied entry to China 02:13
Blocked
As Canadian champion, Lin was due to take part in Miss World 2015, to be held that year in Sanya, on China's southern island of Hainan. 

But as the event approached, her visa request went ignored and she was left hanging, unsure if she could take part in the competition.
She also began receiving distressing messages from her father, who still lives in China. 

Lin said he was approached by security officers and told that if she didn't "stop her political and human rights activities" her family members would be arrested.
These threats did not stop her speaking out -- "my personality is that I can't really hide things" -- but she and her father no longer talk due to fears for his safety.
Many activists have made similar allegations. 

Ilshat Hassan, president of the Uyghur American Association -- which advocates for members of China's Turkic-speaking Muslim minority -- told CNN last year that his family has faced repeated harassment over his activism. 

"Just months ago my mum says please stop what you're doing, or don't call us," he said.
Determined to at least try and take part in Miss World, Lin flew to Hong Kong -- where Canadians do not require a visa to enter -- and attempted to get a flight to Sanya.
"They declared me persona non grata and prevented me from boarding the plane," she said.
Her denial of entry was quickly reported worldwide, massively raising her profile, and earning her a denouncement in the state-run Global Times, which accused her of lacking "reasonable understanding of the country where she was born" and warned her against "being tangled with hostile forces against China."

Miss Puerto Rico Stephanie Del Valle (center) reacts after winning Miss World 2016.
Silenced
Given a second chance to participate in Miss World 2016, Lin vowed to toe the line, not wanting to be denied a place in the final again. 

"I wanted to do things by the book," she said.
Nevertheless, she chose as her "Beauty with a Purpose" project to shine the light on organ harvesting in China, a topic with which she had become familiar with after acting in the Canadian film "The Bleeding Edge."
In June, a report by former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann claimed, based on publicly reported figures by hospitals, that China was still engaged in the widespread and systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners, including prisoners of conscience.
Arriving in Washington DC, Lin received multiple media requests. 

Keen to play by the rules, she said she forwarded them all to Miss World officials, only to have them all initially denied, though several were later granted.
Lin was also angrily rebuked after an official spotted her chatting with a reporter in the lobby of her hotel.
"They said I was breaking rules, telling lies," she said. 

"I felt like a criminal."
During this period, at least six other contestants were allowed to give interviews.
After Miss World allowed her to give press interviews, Lin was still carefully monitored when talking to reporters.

Censorship
Western companies and governments are facing increasing pressure from Beijing as it attempts to sideline overseas critics, said Amnesty International researcher Patrick Poon.
CNN has previously reported how Beijing has reached across borders in its hunt for dissidents, working with cooperative governments to deport critics back to China.
Economic pressure has also been brought to bear on companies that depend on revenue from China.
Last week, Apple removed the New York Times from its Chinese app store on the grounds the paper's app "(violated) local regulations," a move anti-censorship activist Charlie Smith characterized as "actively enabling infringements of human rights."
"Foreign governments and foreign organizations should rethink whether what they have been doing in kowtowing to China's influence means that they compromise (dissidents') freedom of expression and freedom of movement," Poon said.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
Miss World's Morley denied Lin's accusations that her treatment was related to pressure from Beijing, pointing out that this year's competition, unlike Miss World 2015, did not have any Chinese sponsors.
Despite her experiences, Lin said she was grateful to the competition for giving her a platform.
"It's not Miss World's fault they're so nervous, they're a vulnerable pageant organization," Lin said. "The entire world is economically tied to China."

Miss World contender speaks out on China human rights

Miss Canada will be vying for more than the winner's tiara when she competes in the annual Miss World pageant in Washington this weekend
By MATTHEW PENNINGTON

Anastasia Lin, 26, Canada's entrant to Miss World beauty pageant, answers questions during her interview with the Associated Press, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016 in Oxon Hill, Md. Miss Canada will be vying for more than the winner’s tiara when she competes in the annual Miss World pageant in Washington this weekend. Lin wants to tell a global TV audience about the evil of organ-harvesting. Lin was due to compete at Miss World last year when it was hosted by China but was barred from entering the country due to her activism against persecution of Falun Gong, a meditation practice that she follows and China’s government has outlawed. 

WASHINGTON — Poised but defiant, Miss Canada will be vying for more than the winner's tiara when she competes in the annual Miss World pageant in Washington this weekend. 

Anastasia Lin wants to tell the world about the evil of organ-harvesting.
Lin was due to compete at Miss World last year when it was hosted by China but was barred from entering the country due to her activism against persecution of Falun Gong, a meditation practice that she follows and that China's government has outlawed.
U.K.-based Miss World is allowing her to compete again this year in the U.S. 

Miss World, which has Chinese corporate sponsorship, has prevented media organizations from speaking to Lin. 

But she was allowed to speak to The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday in which she spoke forthrightly about her cause, although she sidestepped questions about whether she had faced restrictions.
"Everybody is tied economically with China. China's soft power is so huge that no one really dares to speak up," said Lin, 26, at a hotel just outside Washington at the National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Lin, who was born in China and moved to Canada with her mother at age 13, has riled China's government with her public advocacy. 

She has alleged that tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed so their organs could be harvested and sold for transplants. 

She has spoken out at a U.S. congressional hearing, and since her exclusion from last year's pageant in China, she has attracted world media attention and given testimony before the British and European parliaments. 

She says the Miss World pageant, in which contestants each present a cause or platform, is another opportunity to speak out and give people hope.
"I'm talking about organs being taken from prisoners of conscience, meaning citizens who have not done anything wrong but to speak their mind and believe what they believe in. It's like innocent citizens being killed for their organs and their body parts sold for profits. It's happening and people need to pay attention to it," Lin said.
The Chinese government outlawed Falun Gong in 1999, saying the group had attracted 70 million followers and was a threat to social stability. 

As of 2015, the government claimed it was ending the long-standing practice of involuntarily harvesting the organs of executed prisoners for use in donor transplants, and had replaced it with a "voluntary" donor system, but international medical professionals and human rights advocates question whether that has happened.
Lin said Falun Gong emphasizes "truthfulness, compassion and tolerance" and is persecuted because encourages independent thought.
Lin is also an actress. 

She played a Falun Gong prisoner and organ-harvesting victim in a Canadian-made movie, "The Bleeding Edge," which was screened late Wednesday at a theater in Washington by the activist group, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
In an apparent sign that the Miss World organization was easing constraints on her, Lin attended the screening.
She said that even Western governments are leery of criticizing China.
"Governments are not really speaking out, even for their Chinese citizens outside of China," she said. "Last year when I was banned, the Canadian government did not really take a stand," she said.
Lin said that her father, who lives in China, has faced severe pressure, including multiple lawsuits hurting his business selling medical equipment and has been prevented from traveling from China to attend the pageant. 

Beyond the promotional video on her social media feed, Lin said she'll only have a fleeting chance to speak out at the Miss World ceremonies, and that's only if she makes the top 10, but she's determined to stay the course.
"I'm going to stick here to the end because I know that this Miss World final is going to be watched by a billion people around the world, and it's going to be broadcast to China," she said. 

"I have traveled a long journey to (get) here and I want the people to see me on that show. I want them to see that I have not given up."

Beauty and the Chinese Beast

A beauty queen speaks out about China, and causes tensions at Miss World
By Maura Judkis

Anastasia Lin in a photo taken last year when she was first crowned Miss World Canada — but was unable to compete at the international pageant in China because the government denied her a visa.

Everything seemed to be going well for Miss Canada, Anastasia Lin, during an interview Wednesday promoting the Miss World pageant — until she was asked whether she would be attending a screening of her new movie, which has reportedly enraged officials in her native China.
Lin shot a glance at the four pageant officials assigned to listen in.
“You can ask them,” she told a Washington Post reporter.
One of the officials maintained that Lin could go “if she has spare time” but that she hadn’t yet asked to go.
That’s when things got testy, Lin noting sharply that the screening’s hosts had repeatedly sent requests on her behalf, her handlers insisting she just needed to abide by "certain" protocols.
It was a tempered explosion of the tensions surrounding Lin’s presence at the beauty contest, taking place Sunday at the new MGM National Harbor casino complex in Maryland.
Miss Canada has found herself at odds with Miss World organizers, in a conflict stretching back more than a year regarding her advocacy work against human rights abuses in China — historically, a major sponsor and booster of the pageant.
Lin, 26, a resident of Canada since she was 13, was supposed to represent the country in the 2015 pageant in Sanya, China.
But Chinese authorities denied her a visa because of her political activity and support of Falun Gong, the Buddhist-inflected spiritual movement that has been banned by the government since 1999.
Lin at a press conference in Hong Kong last year. Miss World invited her to compete this year, with the pageant being held in the U.S.

With the pageant moving this year to the United States, organizers offered her another shot at the crown.
Lin signed on, saying she carried no grudge about last year.
“In all fairness, they were in China with 130 girls,” she told The Post on Wednesday.
“For anyone to take a principled stand, it’s not easy.”
But tensions have remained.
The New York Times reported Tuesday night that pageant officials had barred Lin from speaking to the media. 
A Boston Globe reporter attempted to talk to Lin this month, and was sent away.
Meanwhile, Lin recently had a starring role — as a Falun Gong practitioner who is jailed and tortured — in “The Bleeding Edge,” a movie that portrays Chinese political prisoners forced to undergo organ harvesting. 
The D.C.-based Victims of Communism Memorial was scheduled to host a screening Wednesday night, but attempts to invite Lin had been thwarted by the pageant, the Times reported.
And yet Wednesday, after the Times story appeared, Miss World officials made Lin available for a previously requested interview with The Washington Post.
She spoke candidly in front of her handlers about consequences of her advocacy.
Lin’s father still lives in China, and, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post last year, he has faced intense pressure from state-owned media and banks, and his business and morale have suffered.
“To the point of self-harm,” she said.
Lin said she recently received a series of alarming text messages but would not elaborate.
“I believe he is in stable condition right now,” she said.
“I can understand why he feels like he can’t take it anymore.”
The pageant allowed Lin to meet at the State Department with David Saperstein, the ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, to talk about her father.
“Because it’s still a very fluid situation in China, they don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Four representatives of the pageant — publicist Veronica Jeon and three others who did not give names — sat in on Lin’s interview, which included another contestant and the reigning Miss World, Mireia Lalaguna.
In front of them, Lin said that she was not being silenced.
“The first two weeks, I don’t know what happened, but I’m talking to you now, so that’s all that’s important,” she said.
Still, the tension was clear.
One of the pageant officials maintained that all contestants simply needed to “run it by us” if they wanted to see visitors or speak to the media, “so it doesn’t interrupt any rehearsal time [or] doing a specific event.”
“Uh, well, I wish I had known that two weeks ago when the Boston Globe journalist got kicked out,” Lin said, obviously vexed but maintaining a beauty-queen composure.
The official said that the reporter “didn’t ask for the necessary steps to go and meet her.”
“Uh, he did,” Lin said, “sending two requests before we even came here.”
The pageant has forged close ties to China, which has hosted Miss World seven times since 2000. Chinese companies have sponsored the pageant lavishly, and the city of Sanya built a special theater for it.
This year’s pageant, though, is “self-financed,” Jeon said.
Julia Morley, the pageant’s longtime chief executive, was not available for comment.
Lin said that even if she doesn’t win, the most important thing is her presence on that stage.
“This show is going to be broadcast to China,” said Lin.
“For them to be able to see me on a screen and see that I haven’t given up, I haven’t forgotten, and then their voice can be heard is — it’s very important for me and for a lot of people who I have spoken to.”

Miss World Contestant Who Challenged China Is Allowed to Speak Once More

Forced organ harvesting: “China does not have a viable voluntary transplant system, so someone has to die... It’s not like the organs grow on plants.”

By ANDREW JACOBS

Anastasia Lin, Canada’s Miss World entrant, spoke out about murky, government-sanctioned organ transplant programs in China. 

Anastasia Lin, the Miss World contestant whose advocacy for victims of human right abuses in China has infuriated Beijing, appears to have regained her voice.
On Wednesday evening, pageant organizers gave Ms. Lin, a Chinese-born Canadian, the green light to speak to the news media, ending a three-week standoff in Washington that had drawn unflattering attention to a storied beauty pageant that has become increasingly dependent on Chinese corporate sponsors.
According to friends and relatives of Ms. Lin’s, employees of the British-owned beauty pageant had warned her that she would be ejected from the competition if she spoke publicly about China's government-sanctioned transplant programs that rely heavily on the organs of murdered prisoners of conscience.

In a brief phone interview, Ms. Lin, 26, declined to discuss whether she had been silenced and praised the Miss World Organization for allowing her to compete in the finals, which will be televised Sunday night and are expected to draw a global audience of one billion. 

“To their credit, they did give me this platform, and I’m able to speak freely now,” she said.
She also said the pageant’s executive director, Julia Morley, had given her permission to attend the premiere of a feature film, “The Bleeding Edge,” that stars Ms. Lin and seeks to dramatize the cruelties of Chinese government-run programs that harvest the organs of prisoners.
In an emailed statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Morley said she had never barred Ms. Lin from the premiere, which is scheduled for Wednesday night in Washington. 

The event is sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Last year, China blocked Ms. Lin from attending the Miss World finals in Sanya, the southern Chinese resort city that has hosted the finals a half-dozen times since 2003. 

She said pageant officials had made little effort to intervene on her behalf, but they allowed her to retain the Miss Canada title for another year, paving the way for her participation in the 2016 finals.
Ms. Lin sought to focus the interview on her project, which aims to raise awareness about Beijing’s persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in China. 

Adherents face imprisonment, and those who refuse to renounce the movement are subjected to torture.
Ms. Lin and other experts say Falun Gong practitioners who die in custody are unwilling providers of organs for China’s lucrative transplant industry. 

“China does not have a viable voluntary transplant system, so someone has to die,” she said. 

“It’s not like the organs grow on plants.”
She has few illusions that her awareness campaign will make it past China’s strict censors, but she said her appearance in the finals might inspire others willing to stand up to the authorities.
During a visit to Taiwan this year, she described running into a tour group from mainland China. 

She was stunned, she said, when a number of people recognized her and then asked to be photographed by her side.
“Despite 60 years of censorship, people don’t believe everything they hear on the news,” she said, referring to Chinese reports over the past year that have sought to demonize her. 

“I may end up standing in the last row this year, but if they are able to see me, I hope people will be encouraged.”

China's Crimes Against Humanity

Two movies China desperately wants to hide
By Jeff Jacoby

Canada's Miss World contestant Anastasia Lin speaks to media after she was denied entry to mainland China, at Hong Kong International Airport on Nov. 26, 2015.

This week, two extraordinary Canadian films — one a chilling documentary, the other a riveting drama based on its findings — were released for sale on iTunes. 

Directed by Leon Lee, the films illuminate what may be the most depraved of all systematic human-rights atrocities in the world today: China’s industrial-scale harvesting of vital organs from prisoners of conscience, to be transplanted into patients paying exorbitant fees for a heart, kidney, or liver made available on demand.
The documentary, “Human Harvest,” won the coveted Peabody Award for its exposé of an unspeakable crime against humanity. 

In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. 

China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing tens of thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. 

How was that possible?
The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists, added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue. 

Chinese officials claim that organs come from violent criminals on death row. 

But “Human Harvest” makes it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.
Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), a peaceful and nonpolitical discipline, attracted millions of adherents across China during the 1990s. 

But in 1999, Jiang Zemin and the Chinese Communist Party, alarmed by the popularity of a belief system not controlled by the state, abruptly turned against it. 

Practitioners found themselves demonized as dangerous cultists; by the hundreds of thousands they were arrested and imprisoned, often subjected to ghastly torture until they “transformed” — i.e., until they signed a document renouncing Falun Gong. 

Many who wouldn’t died under the knife, literally butchered for their organs.
As awareness of China’s gruesome organ-harvesting crimes has spread, a few Western governments have moved to combat it through laws prohibiting citizens from traveling to China for transplants or barring insurance companies from covering it. 

In conferences and parliamentary hearings, activists have pressed for a comprehensive strategy to end to organ harvesting. 

But the best vehicle to arouse a massive audience to resist China’s massive evil is popular culture. Hence Lee’s newest movie: a feature-length thriller, “The Bleeding Edge.”
The film stars Anastasia Lin, a gifted Chinese-Canadian actress who also happens to be the reigning Miss World Canada. 

She plays Chen Jing, a young Falun Gong practitioner who is jailed and brutally tortured for her refusal to “transform.” 

A simultaneous plot line follows James Branton (played by Jay Clift), a hard-charging tech entrepreneur whose heart collapses while on a business trip to China to close a major deal with the government. 

Branton receives an emergency transplant that saves his life — and motivates him to find out how a suitable organ could have been located so quickly.
Lin drew international headlines last year when she was forbidden to enter China, where the 2015 Miss World pageant was being held. 

For Lin, who was born and lived in China until she was 13, beauty pageants are a means of calling attention to human-rights abuses in her native land, and Beijing was intent on denying her a Chinese platform from which to speak.
This year’s Miss World pageant is taking place in Washington, D.C. 

Lin is once again representing Canada. 

The competition’s motto is “Beauty with a Purpose,” and Lin’s purpose hasn’t wavered: to shed light on China’s terrible repression, particularly its inhuman treatment of those who practice Falun Gong.
“The Bleeding Edge” will be screened in Washington a few days before the Miss World final on Dec. 18, and the iTunes listing is timed to coincide with Lin’s bid for the crown. 

Far better, of course, would be a wide theatrical release, but no theater chain has agreed to show the movie. 

That isn’t because of any problem with the quality of the film — it is a gripping work, and Lin’s performance is haunting. 

But China’s regime exerts enormous leverage on the US movie industry. 

Studios are afraid to make films that may face resistance in the Chinese market, and major swaths of the American theater market, such as AMC Entertainment, are Chinese-owned subsidiaries.
When Beijing aims to stifle a message, it takes grit to push back. 

Lin’s father, who still lives in China, was threatened by security agents into severing his ties with a daughter he adores. 

A renowned Canadian fashion designer who was eager to provide dresses for Lin’s Miss World appearances abruptly backed out after allegedly receiving a warning from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa. 

Lin has been told more than once that she is effectively blacklisted in Hollywood.
Making any film is challenging, but “The Bleeding Edge” has also had to contend with the roadblocks that come with Chinese enmity. 

Chinese-speaking cast and crew members who were supposed to work with Lee backed out for fear of endangering loved ones in China. 

Owners of venues where filming was to take place panicked when they heard actors rehearsing their lines. 

One potential distributor told Lee: “I am not keen on putting my head in China’s crosshairs... I really wish I could publicly attach my name to this, but too many of my paychecks are involved in Chinese funds.”
Yet Leon Lee and Anastasia Lin have not lost their resolve. 

Nor have they lost sight of their goal. 

They seek not fame or fortune for themselves, but liberty for China’s people and an end to an crime against humanity so evil that it could have been devised by Josef Mengele. 

China wants to quash “The Bleeding Edge.” 

All the more reason to view it.