Enes Kanter: Boston Celtics game broadcast pulled in China after center’s pro-Tibet posts
The web site for Tencent Sports activities additionally indicated that upcoming Celtics video games wouldn’t be livestreamed, moderately simply an interactive graphic proven as an alternative.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, a Celtics fan web page with roughly 615,000 followers posted that it might not be posting updates from the staff due to a participant’s social media oversights.
“Any further, our web page will now not report any details about the Boston Celtics, and our Weibo will cease updating!” learn the publish from Celtics Weibo Categorical. “For any habits that undermines concord of the nations and the dignity of the motherland, we resolutely resist!”
The Dalai Lama has been dwelling in exile in India since a failed rebellion in opposition to Chinese language rule in 1959 and often travels the world to unfold his message of tolerance and peace.
CNN has reached out to the NBA and Tencent for remark.
“My message to the Chinese language authorities is free Tibet,” Kanter mentioned. “Tibet belongs to Tibetans, I’m right here so as to add my voice and communicate out in opposition to what is occurring in Tibet beneath the Chinese language authorities’s brutal rule.”
“Beneath the Chinese language authorities’s brutal rule, Tibetan individuals’s fundamental rights and freedoms are non-existent.”
Later within the day, when Kanter’s Boston Celtics took to the courtroom of their season-opening sport in opposition to the New York Knicks, he was sporting footwear with the message “Free Tibet” on the aspect.
“We are going to by no means settle for these assaults to discredit Tibet’s improvement and progress,” he mentioned.
A number of Chinese language companies lower ties with the Rockets because of this and the NBA got here beneath extreme stress from Chinese language authorities.
Tibet is an internationally acknowledged autonomous area inside the Folks’s Republic of China, although many Tibetans dispute the legitimacy of China’s rule.