A hysterical over-reaction to something small does not show how strong someone is. It shows how weak and insecure they are.
That’s the proper context for the fracas between China and the NBA. China’s over-the-top reaction to a single deleted tweet from a Houston Rockets exec in support of the Hong Kong protestors demonstrates once again how insecure and weak the Chinese communist regime perceives itself.
This is not a bunch that acts with the confidence of widespread support from its own citizens, much less from the international community. China doesn’t speak softly but carry a big stick. China throws a temper tantrum at the smallest slight. It’s a regime that has only one thing to offer, its teeming population, which it pimps out to the world in the form of cheap manufacturing labor and a growing consumer base.
China’s only offer is its people, and its only tool is force, most often used to intimidate its own people, but sometimes its customers. It deprives its population of human rights, rule of law and any information from the outside world it considers to be a threat through censorship and government control of the media.
But the Chinese found out about basketball, and they love it. Something like 500 million Chinese are fans and customers of the NBA, according to Bloomberg, through streaming video and merchandise sales.
Other Chinese, however, don’t have the luxury of watching the NBA. Some of them don’t even have the luxury of retaining their own bodily organs. Among other offenses, China is engaged in a slow-motion genocide against the Uighurs, a minority Muslim population. They are being imprisoned, tortured, interned in camps, and yes, in some cases both Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners have been executed in an attempt to exterminate religious belief and to facilitate trade in human organs.
It is to this repressive regime that the NBA, usually keen on social justice virtue signaling, now kneels. All so that an already wealthy league can be a little bit wealthier.
While China’s reaction reveals its insecurity, the NBA’s reaction reveals something as well. This same NBA threatens U.S. states with boycotts and financial sanctions if their democratically elected legislators dare consider legislation it disfavors. I was in the hearing when the NBA threatened Texas with economic punishment when the Texas legislature was considering various versions of a bathroom bill. And this was fresh on the heels of the NBA’s threats to North Carolina. So the NBA would use its clout to punish American states but cowers before a murderous, undemocratic, totalitarian communist dictatorship, showing more regard for the Chinese dictators than for American basketball fans.
There is a way for the U.S. to engage constructively with countries like China. Yes, by all means, trade with them, and use our economic clout to encourage gradual political liberalization and push for human rights. Yes, participate with them in global institutions and exchanges of art, culture, and sports, and show them by degrees the superiority of individual liberty. It hasn’t yet worked with China, but the future remains an open book. Few saw the collapse of the Soviet Union coming until it happened. It’s too soon to say it can’t work with China, though China is clearly lurching in the wrong direction. But who is to say this isn’t the beginning of the death throes of the Chinese Communist regime? The insecurity of the regime might be seen in retrospect as a leading indicator.
But we shouldn’t sell our souls to the Chinese regime in exchange for their market. There are some things to which we must say “no.” Sadly, the NBA and other U.S. companies seem only to say “yes, comrade.” In recent days Americans have been thrown out of NBA games simply for holding up signs that read “Google Uighurs.” Those are Chinese-style speech limitations, in NBA arenas.
Somewhere, in an alternate universe, when some bureaucrat in China had a temper tantrum about an NBA GM’s tweet, the team and the league had enough confidence in their product to put out a simple statement saying “the National Basketball Association recognizes the rights of all human beings to express their political opinions without fear of retribution, and we look forward to the day when our friends in China enjoy the same right.”
In response, of course, the Chinese government would overreact, ban NBA broadcasts, shut down merchandise sales, and end partnerships with NBA teams. NBA revenue would drop, and still leaving the league with billions in annual revenue, plenty to keep everyone wealthy.
Meanwhile, in China, 500 million Chinese basketball fans would be reminded of how reactive and insecure their government is, and would associate political free speech with the superiority of the NBA product on the court.
In that universe, the history books might well credit the NBA’s courage as a factor in the eventual overthrow of the repressive regime and the freedom of the Chinese people.
But sadly, not this universe, and not this NBA.