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China’s war with the NBA and the frailty of the liberal
order
(iStock/Washington
Post illustration)
Like so much discord in
the digital age, it all began with a tweet.
On Friday, Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball
team, posted an image showing support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy
protesters. The somewhat anodyne message of solidarity — which was later
removed — unleashed a fire hose of
acrimony. Chinese netizens and state institutions reacted with outrage
over a perceived attack on Chinese sovereignty; American politicians in an
increasingly anti-Beijing Washington decried Chinese nationalism; the U.S.
National Basketball Association, the league to which the Rockets belonged,
found itself awkwardly caught in the middle and issued a mealy-mouthed
apology that only stoked the controversy.
The league later put
out different statements in
Chinese and English. A message posted on Chinese social media suggested
NBA officials were “extremely disappointed” by what it deemed was Morey’s
“inappropriate” comment. A subsequent message put out by NBA Commissioner
Adam Silver purported to uphold American values on the world stage. “Values
of equality, respect and freedom of expression have long defined the NBA —
and will continue to do so,” Silver said Tuesday. “As
an American-based basketball league operating globally, among our greatest
contributions are these values of the game.”
The NBA has spent
decades blazing a path into China, where it retains tens of millions of
die-hard fans. The Rockets — who for years boasted towering Chinese
superstar Yao Ming in their ranks — are especially popular. Their footprint
in the world’s most populous nation proved deeply lucrative. But all of
that steady corporate work seemed at risk in the aftermath of Morey’s
tweet.
That same day, China’s
state television network announced it would withhold
broadcasts at least for this week of the NBA’s preseason games. A
series of Chinese brands, including smartphone maker Vivo and the Luckin
Coffee chain, severed sponsorship deals with the American league. Criticism
also came from Tencent, the major Chinese tech firm that has a $1.5 billion
streaming deal with the NBA. In the United States, Republican senators and
Democratic presidential candidates all cajoled the NBA to stand its ground
and not cave to this form of political correctness with Chinese
characteristics.
Though the protests in
Hong Kong have struck a particularly sensitive nerve in China, the current
spat is hardly a stand-alone occurrence — and it may be a sign of things to
come. “As China’s economic clout expands, its government and
consumers are coercing international companies and punishing speech they
deem critical, adding a growing element of unpredictability for foreign
executives weighing the opportunities and risks of doing business in the
country,” explained The Post’s Gerry Shih.
There were other
incidents just this week. After a recent episode of the irreverent American
cartoon comedy “South Park” mocked how Hollywood studios and executives
create content these days in fear of Chinese censorship, Chinese censors
followed through and carried out a sweeping purge
of the show from Chinese streaming sites and social media pages. Blizzard,
an American video game company that counts Tencent as a part investor,
became the target of an Internet boycott after it banned a champion esports
contestant who called for Hong Kong’s liberation and stripped him of his
prize money.
In the past, other
Western companies have suffered similar censure. Mercedes-Benz apologized
for hurting “the feelings of the Chinese people” when it cited the Dalai
Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, in an Instagram post. Companies as
disparate as U.S. airline Delta and Spanish fashion brand Zara both issued groveling apologies after
publicly listing operations in Taiwan — which China views as a
breakaway province — as a separate country from China on its website.
There’s nothing new
about Chinese nationalist anger. But Beijing’s political tensions with
Washington and China’s growing global clout are forcing multinational firms
to pay attention. “These dynamics have gone on for a long time,” tweeted Paul Mozur, a
China tech correspondent for the New York Times. “The Hong Kong protests
are causing China’s underbelly of speech control to go mainstream in a huge
way. The more Beijing pushes for control, the more the global narrative will
slip away from it, and it won’t be pretty.”
The current disputes
underscore a now inescapable reality of global politics. Many
U.S. firms — along with corporate behemoths like the NBA — went into China
insisting that their forays into a vast, untapped market would bring the
world closer together. The opening of China’s economy, many genuinely
believed, would be followed by an inexorable liberalization of Chinese
politics and society.
China “has been rising
for more than 40 years, unaccompanied by effective public pressure for
reform. It opted in to the liberal order without liberalizing,” wrote Kori
Schake, a former Bush administration official, in an essay published last
year. “Despite President Xi Jinping’s expansive statements about
preserving the liberal order, China undercuts it politically, economically,
and militarily.”
China’s touchy feelings
over Hong Kong, meanwhile, obscure the genuine sense of crisis brewing in
the former British colony. Beijing looks unlikely
to concede much, while a hardcore segment of Hong Kong pro-democracy
protesters are turning more and more radicalized. “The calculus of
Communist rule does not allow for concessions to unruly provinces,” noted Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times.
“If Xi were to compromise and grant Hong Kong the right to vote for its
leaders then what about Shanghai or Shenzhen? If he does not harshly punish
the territory then the rest of the nation and his many political enemies
would smell weakness, rather than applaud his restraint. Because the people
of Hong Kong instinctively understand what is coming, they are unlikely to
quietly return to their ordinary lives.”
“Hong Kong as Asia’s world
city is finished. There is no way that Hong Kong can recapture its
reputation as an efficient, safe, well-governed, orderly place to live and
work and do business anymore,” Mike Chinoy, a Hong Kong-based nonresident
senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China
Institute, told my colleagues. “Some of this stuff
you can’t put back together.”
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