Again, like a tantrum of a child whose ball is taken away, China has once again put on its censorship target an athlete who has decided to exercise his freedom of expression. A couple of months ago, the anger of Beijing focused on the NBA after Daryl Morey, general director of the Houston Rockets, supported the demonstrations for democracy in Hong Kong. Then, the public television network, CCTV, announced that it will not broadcast Rockets games and several Chinese sponsors threatened to break their contracts with the franchise.

Now it's the turn of the footballer Mesut Özil . The Arsenal player wrote in his Twitter account several messages denouncing the repression of China against the Uighur Muslim minority. From the Asian giant thousands of users of the Weibo social network were thrown into the jugular of the athlete, pouring all kinds of insults for "interfering with the country's internal affairs with lies" and uploading images of his official shirt shatters. And now, CCTV public television has decided that it will not broadcast live Arsenal-Manchester City as planned. Instead, it will broadcast the Wolverhampton-Tottenham open.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published several news in which they revealed how the Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang region, northeast of the country, would have arrested more than one million Uyghurs to take them to "reeducation camps". Following this information, Özil, a German international but of Turkish origin, launched several messages on Friday about the situation of Muslims.

"The Uighurs of Eastern Turkistan are warriors who resist persecution. (In China) They burn burns, there are mosques destroyed, Islamic schools are banned, religious intellectuals are killed one after another ... Brothers sent by force to camps .. Despite all this, Muslims remain silent, "wrote the 31-year-old footballer on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, where he has 24.4 million and 21.1 million followers respectively.

On Saturday, Arsenal wanted to uncheck the messages of one of its star players. "The content he expressed is entirely the personal opinion of Özil. As a football club, Arsenal always adheres to the principle of not getting involved in politics," published the Gunner set in its official Weibo account, a social network similar to Twitter - which is banned in China-, where it has more than 5 million followers.

The commercial ties of Arsenal

Do not forget that the club has strong commercial ties in the Asian country. And it is in negotiations to set up a commercial office and an Arsenal-themed restaurant franchise in several Chinese cities. In addition, this controversy coincides with the three-year retransmission agreement reached by the Premier League with the online transmission service of China PPTV worth 700 million dollars.

"Surely this incident will damage the image of Özil and Arsenal in the eyes of Chinese football fans," said Hu Xijin , editor of the Global Times, the Chinese nationalist newspaper. His newspaper published a story highlighting the soccer player's friendship with the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "Because he is a known athlete, he has no right to comment on issues related to national interests," said the note.

Since the Football Association of China have also shown their "outrage and disappointment" by Özil's comments, describing them as "inappropriate." In addition, one of China's most popular soccer websites, Dongqiudi, added that the footballer had "damaged the feelings of the Chinese people," whose government is in full campaign to deny all accusations about its repression of the Muslim population. "Freedom of expression has limits and should be used on the basis of respect for the sovereignty of other countries, without interfering with their internal affairs," they said.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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