Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday scolded the NBA for appeasing China in the continuing controversy surrounding the NBA and the communist country.

Pompeo told the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville, Tennessee, that he wished the NBA would call out on China’s human rights abuses, Fox News reported.

“The Chinese Communist Party is detaining and abusing more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in the Xinjiang region of China. The pages of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ are coming to life there. I wish the NBA would acknowledge that,” Pompeo said Friday.

The NBA’s stars and coaches have been shy about offending China after Houston Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey backed pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in a tweet.

China protested and canceled broadcasts of some exhibition games and threatened more punitive action if the league, which is trying to cash in on the billions of Chinese NBA fans, repeated any criticism.

The league announced Friday it would not hold media availabilities for the rest of its Chinese trip, a day after Beijing prohibited any kind of news conference before or after a preseason exhibition game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets.

“We have decided not to hold media availability for our teams for the remainder of our trip in China,” the league said in a statement. “They have been placed into a complicated and unprecedented situation while abroad and we believe it would be unfair to ask them to address these matters in real-time.”

The tension between the league and China started earlier this week after Morey tweeted from his personal account a pro-Hong Kong message ahead of the Rockets’ own preseason trip to Japan.