The NBA has desperately tried to get back in the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party, and now, the league is swiftly approaching the final step on that path.
Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is pushing for the league to play preseason games in China once again, which the league hasn’t been able to do since 2019. That was when then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey dared to tweet his support of pro-democracy Hong Kong protesters in the face of China’s oppression, which earned him a rebuke from social justice fraud LeBron James.
That move led to China blacklisting the league on Chinese airwaves up until state broadcaster CCTV aired the final games of the 2020 NBA playoffs and Chinese internet company Tencent aired a Rockets game in early 2021. The league has mostly repaired its relationship with the CCP now that Morey has been cowed into silence (and insulted by NBA stars on Chinese soil) and that the league’s only anti-CCP voice, Enes Kanter Freedom, has disappeared from the league, but the league hasn’t yet brought games back to Chinese soil.
Tsai is hoping to change that. You may remember Tsai, born in Taiwan and chairman of CCP-affiliated tech company Alibaba, as one of the useful idiots who shamed Morey for daring to oppose the CCP’s authoritarianism. According to ESPN reporting, Morey was told directly by one NBA owner that Tsai (who owns the Nets, not the Rockets) was pushing to have Morey fired for his comments. Tsai also thinks human rights problems don’t exist in China because “80%-90% of the population” are “very, very happy.”
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It’s only a matter of time before Tsai gets his wishes and once again normalizes the NBA’s grotesque bond with the world’s worst human rights abuser while presenting itself as the social justice league. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who has desperately tried to downplay the league’s relationship with China while covering up Chinese abuse at NBA academies, estimated in 2021 that the tweet cost the league $400 million.
Silver, Tsai, James, and others can talk all they want about how the NBA is some beacon of social justice, but at the end of the day, money talks louder than all of them. They, and any other NBA figure, should be reminded of that next time they try to lecture the public about morality.