Boston Celtics games have been pulled off Chinese media after center Enes Kanter tweeted a two-minute video of himself expressing support for Tibet and wore shoes with the phrase ‘Free Tibet’ on them during Wednesday night’s game against the New York Knicks.
‘I’m here to add my voice and speak out about what is happening in Tibet. Under the Chinese government’s brutal rule, Tibetan people’s basic rights and freedoms are nonexistent,’ Kanter said in the video posted Wednesday on Twitter and Instagram. He called Chinese President Xi Jinping a ‘brutal dictator’ in the text when he posted the video and wore a shirt with the image of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.
(ESPN, October 21, 2021)
China seems destined to usurp the United States as the world’s richest and most powerful nation. Except how can any Chinese be proud when relatively obscure athletes or actors chanting about Tibet, Taiwan, or Hong Kong on social media can spook their leaders into denying all 1.4 billion of them the enjoyment of watching their favorite sports or movies?
This kind of snowflake censorship is clearly unsustainable. The Chinese people will either revolt, or China will become the hermit kingdom it used to be before President Nixon opened trade in the early 1970s.
What’s more, no matter how lucrative its market, it’s only a matter of time before Americans, Europeans, and others around the world who do business in China get fed up too. This, because resentment is growing worldwide about having to live in constant fear, even when not in China, of causing even a slight crack while walking on the egg shells, which constitute respecting China’s increasingly Orwellian, woke culture