As China’s economic and diplomatic stature has grown, so, too, has its ability to project its influence well beyond its borders. Hollywood, eager to gain access to China’s vast market, has altered film scripts to please China’s censors, and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has been widely criticized at home for seeking to curry favor with Beijing by avoiding public discussion of China’s human-rights abuses.

Minxin Pei, an expert in Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said Beijing had become increasingly successful in bending others to its will.

“Chinese leaders are realists and they know that people will hold their noses and continue to kowtow to them because they have a big checkbook,” he said. “The way they are treating Anastasia Lin is part of a larger strategy for deterring would-be critics: the proverbial slaughter of the chicken that is killed to frighten all those monkeys.”

Ms. Lin, however, refuses to be a chicken. Last May, days after winning the Miss Canada contest in Vancouver, she says security agents visited her father, who remains in China, and urged him to rein in his daughter’s talk about human rights. When she reached him by phone, he refused to talk, hinting that the line was being monitored, but he threatened to sever ties with her if she did not comply.

Instead, Ms. Lin went public with the threats to her father, who owns a medical equipment company. She wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post and testified at a Congressional hearing on human rights in China.

He subsequently cut off financial support.

She said her father was emblematic of the mind-set that hobbles many Chinese, who have been traumatized by the country’s turbulent past and are too fearful to stand up for what they believe is right. “It’s sad because my father thinks putting a picture of Mao in his office will bring him protection,” she said. “But his support of the Communist Party isn’t really about love, it’s about fear.”