Nike has remained mum on Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter's accusation that it produces sneakers from what he calls "Chinese slave labor camps."
Kanter also invited Nike’s president Phil Knight and NBA legends Michael Jordan and Lebron James to visit the factories.
The National Basketball Association also kept its silence after Kanter called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “brutal dictator.”
In a series of videos on Twitter, Kanter also asked the Chinese government to free Tibet and close down “the slave labor camps and free the Uyghur people.”
Kanter’s statements resulted in the Chinese video streaming platform Tencent cutting the live broadcast of the Celtics’ games last week. Tencent signed a five-year, $1.5 billion deal to remain the NBA’s digital partner in China in 2019.
Born in Switzerland to Turkish parents, Kanter is a vocal critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kanter’s Turkish passport was revoked in 2017.
The NBA's relations with China have been tense since former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2019.
The tweets prompted the Chinese government to stop the broadcast of NBA games in China.
The NBA eventually returned to Tencent, although the games of the Philadelphia 76ers, where Morey moved after the 2019 season, are not broadcasted.
Meanwhile, the state-controlled China Central Television still refuses to cover the NBA except for two games during the 2020 NBA finals. Last year, the NBA lost an estimated $200 million in revenue from China.a civil suit.
