New York (AFP)
Hundreds of people wearing Hong Kong protesters t-shirts invited themselves on Friday to the Brooklyn Nets NBA pre-season game, which hosted the Toronto Raptors, where they sang songs of support.
While the political crisis between the NBA and China, born of a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, seemed to subside, especially on the side of Beijing, it is at Barclays Center that happened this new episode.
Behind one of the basketball boards in the hall, a few hundred fans dressed in black T-shirts with "Stand With Hong Kong" ("Support Hong Kong") gathered during the meeting won by Toronto (123-107). Others wore white t-shirts with "Free Tibet" printed on it.
"We want to use our performance art to show our support for Hong Kong and the NBA," organizer Chen Pokong told the New York Post.
"It seems that NBA people can not choose their words, so if we do not stop (the Chinese leaders) will not do bad things only in China, they will also do it in America," he said. he argued.
No coincidence that the Brooklyn Room was chosen by the organizers of this militant happening, since its owner and that of the Nets is Joseph Tsai, the Taiwan-Canadian billionaire, co-founder of the Chinese giant online business Alibaba.
While her team found herself in a diplomatic storm last week in China, where she was on a promotional tour including two exhibition matches against the Los Angeles Lakers, the businessman said on his Facebook account that the Morey's tweet was intolerable to the Chinese government and citizens. "The injury caused by this incident will take a long time to close," he wrote.
Hong Kong, a former British colony returned to China in 1997 and now an autonomous territory, has been rocked since June by increasingly violent protests that demand, among other things, more civil liberties and autonomy in the face of Beijing's growing control.
© 2019 AFP