NBA vs China
In what has been wrongly branded a stand-off, the NBA is carefully planning how to repair its damaged business relationship with China. A single tweet about the months-long protest in Hong Kong briefly jeopardized an estimated $4 billion market for the world’s most successful basketball league. That’s not a standoff. That’s the closure of a one-way street. The NBA needs China more than China needs the NBA. The American organization must now weigh the worth of the value it places on freedom of speech.
It all began in Oct. 4, with Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey taking to Twitter to express his support for the protests in Hong Kong. The retribution was swift, the retraction just as quick. China’s government network CCTV announced it would pull its broadcasts of the NBA’s preseason games, and Chinese online stores stopped selling Rockets merchandise. Morey’s boss, Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta said that Morey does not speak for the franchise, and the offending tweet was taken down. But streaming service Tencent, which has a five-year, $1.5 billion deal with the league, stopped showing Rockets games in China. Shots fired. In a painful twist, former Houston Rockets top draft pick and now Chinese Basketball Association head Yao Ming announced the cessation of cooperation with the team. When Yao Ming played for the Rockets, even regular season games drew an estimated additional 20 million Chinese viewers. Today, roughly 800 million Chinese watch (or is it watched?) NBA games.
Until the early 1990’s, NBA personalities played it safe politically. But succeeding generations, realizing their power in a media-savvy environment, have spoken put vociferously on issues ranging from racial inequality, labor relations, immigration, poverty, US foreign policy, and others. But for the most part, those were issues internal to the US. Now, however, China is giving a frightening warning that, as a superpower unto itself, and an Asian nation sensitive to loss of face, it will brook no interference – or even criticism – from an entity which profits from its sheer market size.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver apologized but declared no punishment for Morey. He later revised his statement expressing support for freedom of speech. NBA superstars like Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry have been circumspect about their comments, acknowledging that it is a complex issue. Others caution blindly taking the moral high ground with so much business at stake. It took the league over a quarter of a century to gain the trust of the huge Communist country, beginning with those tentative trips by the Atlanta Hawks in the late 1980’s. The NBA was able to convince Chinese authorities to allow Yao to be drafted in 2002, after Wang Zhizhi rebelled and sought a better future in America. In 2004, the league held its first preseason games in China, with the Rockets and Sacramento Kings playing in Shanghai and Beijing. That formally announced that the Middle Kingdom was open for business.
To be fair, China and its media outlets have scaled back their outrage, and regular broadcasts of NBA preseason games continue. State media have ordered that the issue no longer be prolonged, and the headlines have gone on to other matters. Meanwhile, other foreign businesses interested in earning from China’s 1.4 billion consumers are analyzing the situation to avoid making the same misstep. The country’s culture is not the same as straightforward American style. In Mao Zedong’s time a Communist Party leader, he abolished sports in China entirely. Entire books like “Operation Yao Ming” discuss the complexity of dealing with Chinese government. They may say one thing and mean something else entirely.