\n<\/p>\n
HONG KONG \u2014 Former NBA star Dwight Howard faced a wave of fury in China on Friday after referring to Taiwan as a \u201ccountry\u201d in a promotional video.<\/p>\n
Howard, 37, made the comment as he appeared alongside the island’s vice president, William Lai-Chingte, to promote a contest that will allow the winners to spend a night in Taiwan’s presidential office. <\/p>\n
\u201cSince I came to Taiwan, I\u2019ve gained a whole new appreciation of this country,\u201d said the eight-time NBA All-Star,\u00a0who in November as a free agent signed with\u00a0the Taoyuan Leopards in the Taiwanese city of Taoyuan after leaving the Los Angeles Lakers<\/p>\n
Lai, who plays the director of the commercial, also described Taiwan as a “free country” in the video that was published Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Howard, who is well known in China, where the NBA is very popular, immediately faced backlash on the popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo, where \u201c#HowardTaiwanindependence\u201d began trending almost immediately. <\/p>\n
By Friday the hashtag had received almost 400 million views on the Twitter-style site, which is heavily censored by government moderators. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou were my idol, but not anymore,\u201d one user wrote. Another wrote that Taiwan was \u201can inseparable part of China,\u201d reflecting Beijing’s policy toward the island, which sits around 100 miles off China’s southeastern coast.<\/p>\n
Beijing views Taiwan as an illegitimate breakaway province that is part of China’s territory. When the civil war in China between the communists and nationalists ended in 1949 with the former triumphant, the latter set up a rival government in Taipei.<\/p>\n
Since the 1970s, the U.S. has officially only recognized China. Under the \u201cOne China\u201d policy, Washington acknowledges Beijing\u2019s position that Taiwan is part of China without endorsing it and maintains unofficial relations with Taipei.<\/p>\n
In addition to social media backlash, Howard was criticized by China’s hawkish state-run nationalist tabloid, The Global Times. In an editorial, the newspaper called for him to apologize.<\/p>\n
Its former editor, Hu Xijin, also took to Weibo to accuse Howard of being a \u201cperson who is hasty and seeks immediate benefits.\u201d He said that Howard was making \u201cfast money\u201d in Taiwan because he is aware of his fading popularity.<\/p>\n
Howard moved to clarify his comments Friday during a visit to a primary school in northern Taiwan.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I offended anyone in China, I apologize,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was not my intention to harm anyone with what I said in the commercial.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that when he used the word \u201ccountry,\u201d he did not mean that Taiwan was a sovereign nation. <\/p>\n
However, some Weibo users were less than impressed. \u201cThis is not an apology, this is just sophistry,\u201d one wrote.<\/p>\n This is not the first time a basketball star has incurred the wrath of Chinese social media users.<\/p>\n In 2021, then-Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter was widely criticized after he posted a video to social media in which he labeled\u00a0Chinese President Xi Jinping\u00a0a \u201cbrutal dictator\u201d and voiced support for\u00a0Tibet\u2019s independence. <\/p>\n Tencent, which as the NBA\u2019s digital streaming partner in China attracts a half-billion viewers a season, later pulled a broadcast of the Celtics\u2019 game against the New York Knicks, and searches for Kanter\u2019s name appeared to have been blocked on Weibo. <\/p>\n The center later changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom.<\/p>\n Two years earlier, then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey apologized for a tweet in support of\u00a0pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong after several sponsors bailed on the team. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HONG KONG \u2014 Former NBA star Dwight Howard faced a wave of fury in China on Friday after referring to Taiwan as a \u201ccountry\u201d in a promotional video. Howard, 37, made the comment as he appeared alongside the island’s vice president, William Lai-Chingte, to promote a contest that will allow the winners to spend a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18960,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[2500,3129,673,880,881,1231,4171],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18959"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18961,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18959\/revisions\/18961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nbanewsinsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}