While Donald Trump makes political hay from losing platforms for his beauty pageants after race-baiting Mexicans, a Canadian pageant winner is facing real repercussions for using her position to try to effect actual social change.

Anastasia Lin won the Miss World Canada pageant in May. Lin, 25, is a theatre major at the University of Toronto, and spoke out frequently against China’s persecution of religious minorities during the competition, according to the Globe and Mail. She has also acted in numerous films that deal with the issue of human rights in China.

Those actions are now having a significant impact on her family. Lin, who was born in China and moved to Canada wih her mother at age 13, wites in the Washington Post that while winning the competition is an honor, it’s coming with consequences for her father, who still lives in China.

Shortly after my victory, my father started receiving threats from Chinese security agents complaining about my human rights advocacy. As an actress, I frequently take on roles in films and television productions that shed light on official corruption and religious persecution in China, and my Miss World Canada platform reflects these passions. No doubt fearing for his livelihood and business, my father asked me to stop advocating for human rights. He told me that if I did not stop, we would have to go our separate ways.

Rather than go silent, Lin is using the intimidation of her father as another avenue to speak out against the Chinese government’s actions, and to shed light on the practices that keep families silent.

“In many cases, family members are “invited to tea” by members of the security agencies, who then issue vague threats of reprisals if their relatives abroad don’t fall into line,” she wrote.

The result, Lin said, is pressure to de-politicize her platform and to lay off the human rights issue. Lin said in May that only days after winning the pageant, her father told her he would cut her off if she didn't stop speaking out.

"You must stop all the political and human rights work you are doing, otherwise I will stop all support to you," he told her. Lin says she tried to call her father after receiving the text, but he refused to speak to her out of fear his phone might be tapped. "Whatever you have sent to me, anything political, has been censored," he told her via text. "Do you know the secret security force has come to me?"

Now, Lin said, her father is afraid to speak to her. But she wrote this week that she hopes speaking out will help to free not only her father, but the families of so many others who suffer because of the words of relatives outside of China.

Days will pass, and this spotlight will dim. Please don’t forget my father and the millions of families like ours. Leaving China doesn’t make one free, not when friends and family there become hostages. Freedom comes when we stop accepting tyranny and challenge those who would preserve it.

Lin's continued stance against the Chinese government is all the more contentious because she's slated to be Canada's representative in the 2015 Miss World pageant, which will be held in Sanya, China in December.