1 Aug. 2021 21:03 Uhr
The latest target in the trade war between the US and China are players from the US basketball league NBA, who have signed sponsorship agreements with Chinese sporting goods manufacturers. They should terminate their contracts or be forced to terminate them.
by Dagmar Henn
In the US, NBA players are being attacked by Republican politicians for having sponsorship deals with Chinese sportswear companies. Republican MP Scott Perry of Pennsylvania explained: “Americans cannot and should not do business with companies and gamblers who benefit from human slavery.” By this, of course, he does not mean the prison slavery system, which is home to two million people in the United States, but rather the forced labor claimed by Western media in Xinjiang, China.
Currently, 13 NBA players have contracts with the brands Anta, Li-Ning or Peak. The Congress Committee on China, in which both US parties are represented, had one at the beginning of June Write addressed to the players’ association NBPA, in which it was asked to educate members “about the use of forced labor in the manufacture of sportswear in China”.
On July 15th, the US Congress passed a law adoptedbanning the import of cotton and cotton products from Xinjiang; that should finally make US sporting goods unsaleable in China. Last year’s declarations by Nike and Adidas that they would no longer use cotton from Xinjiang had caused their sales in China to collapse. However, the law does not yet provide a basis for forcing the NBA stars to terminate their contracts. That would only be possible if the companies themselves were on a sanctions list.
The Chinese brands are not even available in the US, at most via internet deliveries from Canada. They have sponsorship deals with NBA players because that’s good advertising in China. However, the broadcast of the NBA games in China had already been suspended after sports manager Daryl Morey publicly backed the violent protests in Hong Kong.
What is spicy about it is not only that the allegations that the US is making against China over Xinjiang are extremely poorly substantiated and very visibly part of a trade war; The claim that the players profited from slave labor is particularly spiced up by the fact that the black players themselves are descendants of slaves, while many members of the US upper class owe their wealth to slavery. The icing on the cake of the bizarre spectacle, however, is the fact that the US cotton is still picked today using predominantly black prisoners, this one Slave labor in the US is well documented and not even denied.
more on the subject – The West has no right to ask Muslim countries to condemn China
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