The NBA's Going Back to China

Because time heals even geopolitical wounds

Someday soon, the NBA will be back in its largest foreign market. It already kind of is. The deep freeze of five years ago, following Daryl Morey’s infamous Hong Kong tweet, has largely thawed. NBA games are again airing in China — broadcast on state-run TV, no less — and have been for over two years now.

So it may be more symbolic than not when the NBA, according to commissioner Adam Silver, resumes playing exhibition games in China. Before the Morey incident, the league had been playing at least one preseason game there pretty much every year. Now Silver thinks they’ll be back.

"I think we will bring games back to China at some point," Silver said last Thursday. "China's government took us off the air for a period of time — we accepted that, we stood by our values ... anybody in our league has the right to speak out on political matters."

Now, I’m obligated to point out: the pro-Hong Kong protests for which Morey voiced his support now feel like a distant memory. Mainland China has tightened its grip on the city state, with no apparent intention to loosen it ever again. Hong Kong’s fight to preserve its political independence is over. It lost.

For the NBA to return now that that fait has been thoroughly accompli’d is something short of standing by one’s values. So, I wouldn’t endorse the way Silver frames that, and I’m sure Morey wouldn’t either.

Privately, that is. Don’t be expecting any more principled pro-democracy tweets from the Sixers GM. Nope. Bad for business. That singular tweet cost the league somewhere on the order of $200M dollars, felt at every level of the NBA’s finances. It dinged the friggin’ salary cap. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it directly cost the league, its teams, and even its players money.

Which is not, obviously, a moral commentary on what Morey had to say. He wasn’t wrong. The frantic rush to condemn his statement — including disappointing reactions from players like LeBron James, who called Morey “misinformed” — had nothing to do with whether Hong Kongers do (or did) have a right to political self-determination.

It had everything to do with whether saying so would upset Chinese leadership. The NBA’s been running damage control ever since.

We talk about this often around here. American sports leagues are leaning into their global fanbases, partly out of a recognition that that’s where the highest potential for future growth is. For the NBA, which knows it can’t credibly compete with the NFL here in the U.S., they need those foreign fans, and they’re willing to overlook human rights abuses and the rest to court them.

You could say the NBA is looking at this a lot like its most famous alumnus, Michael Jordan, once memorably looked at shoe sales. The Chinese Communist Party watches basketball too.

And it has for a while. The NBA’s history in China goes back many decades, many more than a lot of people probably realize. For Chinese leadership, it originates with the economic reforms, beginning in 1978, that brought the country into the global market economy. There was a desire to “open up” and engage with, predominantly, the West.

While that took many forms, most of them frankly more impactful than cultural diplomacy via basketball, it’s still worth noting that the NBA’s first official visit to the country came promptly in 1979. The Washington then-Bullets came by and played the league’s first exhibition games in China, kicking off a relationship that would grow with time.

And we should emphasize, because it’s hard to wrap our heads around today: China was not viewed as an adversary to the U.S. back then. No one would have gotten too worked up about a visit like that. At the time, the hope among the West was that diplomatic engagement with China, in addition to its growing integration with global markets, would help to eventually produce a more liberal and democratically inclined China. Whoops!

That theory has since been proven wrong, but that was the prevailing wisdom. It was a project of the league’s former commissioner, David Stern, to invest in the Chinese market. In the late 80s, he negotiated a deal to air NBA games for free over China Central Television, the same state-run network that airs them now, a clear attempt to maximize exposure to a massive population with growing purchasing power.

When you look at it strictly from a business standpoint, then, it’s hard to argue with the results. Smart bet. That market has become a huge boon for the league. With the emergence of Yao Ming, it became an even bigger one. It stands to reason that we’ll probably see at least one more major Chinese star reach the NBA in the decades to come, which could further supercharge basketball’s popularity there.

China, of course, isn’t doing this just for fun. CCTV airs the NBA because it’s a lucrative business for them too. They’re getting a sizable piece of the economic activity around basketball, which is a considerable outlay when you again consider that there are more fans of the league in China than in any other country on earth.

So long as the NBA isn’t seen as undermining the goals of the Chinese regime, they’re going to allow it to be a part of the culture there. The deal is too good not to. I don’t know what China’s ultimate intentions are with respect to confrontation with the U.S., but I note with interest that China is pushing “people-to-people ties” with America of late.

There is at least an argument to be made that engagement with China has the potential to affect positive change. It could have no other benefit at all and still be worth it if it helps avoid a direct conflict between the world’s top two superpowers. Cultural exchange was a hallmark of America’s original Cold War with the USSR, and it’s part of today’s with China.

Nerd alert, but when it comes to international relations, the theory of ‘realism’ holds that nation states act in their own self-interest, ethics be damned, in pursuit of power. I happen to think that theory applies even more clearly to businesses. The NBA, for instance. They’re going to look out for themselves.

In that sense, this is no different from the sportswashing discourse around Saudi Arabia. The PGA Tour had principles too, until they became financially disadvantageous. When it came down to it, they acted in their own self-interest.

The NBA will do the same. That’s not to say that it’s morally right, which it isn’t. It’s also not to say that it will stay that way forever. You can imagine a scenario where the U.S. and China clash over the fate of Taiwan sometime in the next decade and it becomes untenable for American businesses, the NBA included, to be seen as fraternizing with a hot war adversary rather than a cold war one.

But make no mistake: the NBA will engage with China so long as it thinks it can get away with it, and they’ll accept the criticism that comes with that, unless and until it becomes too much. That, to be clear, would take a lot.

You don’t have to like it. I certainly don’t. And I think it’s perfectly appropriate to call the league out for this. It’s noble to stand up for social justice in one’s own country, but it does not reflect all that well when the same league is all too willing to overlook over a million people detained in concentration camps because it’s not something the Chinese regime wants discussed.

Silver isn’t stupid. This isn’t a consideration he’d like to be faced with. But he’s going to act in the best interest of the league he runs, and he’ll weather the consequences. From where I’m standing, the prevailing criticism — that the NBA is overly deferential to the Chinese government — is definitively accurate.

But, when I asked preeminent Substacker and China expert

Bill Bishop

whether he agreed, he didn’t take me up on the moral judgment aspect of this. And I’m sure Silver wouldn’t either, if I got a chance to ask him the same thing.

Bishop, rather, replied matter of factly. Playing nice with the regime? “That is one of the requirements of trying to have a business in China.”

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