The Chinese government's reaction to this seems extraordinarily strong to me.
The NBA is hugely popular there, don't they risk annoying huge chunks of their own population by taking it off the air?
Morey is not even an especially notable NBA figure, Twitter doesn't even work in China, it would have been easy to block news of this in China. It seems like the reaction would cause a Streisand effect there.
Isn't a backlash among the US population over this plainly foreseeable? That doesn't seem like its in their interests.
Working off the assumption that the Chinese government is rational, why is its reaction here so strong?
What other things are about to happen, that make this reaction make sense?
Some possibilities, banning NBA could be low cost oblique trade war retaliation. Chinese going to stream for free anyways.
Ramping up Chinese nationalism in response to HK forced the governments hand. This is why CPC tries to contain nationalism normally, it's hard to contain and limits maneuverability. Also CPC foreign propaganda organ is... very inept. NBA is very popular there might actually be backlash.
Punishing western companies for questioning Chinese sovereignty issues as been consistently happening for years. The Chinese response has been completely consistent with past behaviors. They've always been extremely heavy handed on this issue. It's only an issue in the west due to Sino-US tensions being escalated into culture clash / war territory.
Edit, to add on culture, in China, central government influence over companies is perceived as a sign of strength and not fragility. Which leads to naive hot takes here like the government is scared when the opposite is true. Yes, NBA has a huge market but not larger than Chinese sovereignty. Conceding on this point is an existential weakness.
> The NBA is hugely popular there, don't they risk annoying huge chunks of their own population by taking it off the air?
That is a mistake. Many hyper-nationalists already called a broad ban on NBA, and so far even the fans need to claim they will give up their interests for their love of the country.
And it is probably that way already. If no further response from NBA satisfying China's official account on this matter, the ban will extend into regular season and NO ONE will question it.
It is grassroot nationalistic parade, the CCP is merely riding it, and even they need to do this carefully.
> The NBA is hugely popular there, don't they risk annoying huge chunks of their own population by taking it off the air?
Yes, by design. The Chinese government is signalling that the NBA is anti-China, just like they did with the iPhone (sales are down over 20% as a result of the government's marketing campaign and market pressure from Huawei.) Patriotic Chinese will get the message and stop watching the NBA.
> Morey is not even an especially notable NBA figure, Twitter doesn't even work in China, it would have been easy to block news of this in China.
NBA fan, who will NOT be renewing league pass, checking in. Morey is considered one of the top NBA GM's of one of the top teams (Rockets) that have a strong Sino-centric fan base because of former Rocket great, Yao Ming. Yao was the first Chinese superstar in the NBA. The Rockets are the 'adopted' team of China.
> Isn't a backlash among the US population over this plainly foreseeable?
I agree - I'm not paying for league pass this year. I did not like the response from the NBA.
Another longtime NBA fan here, just backing up what you're saying about Morey. Especially in regards to the NBA in China, he's a fairly significant figure, more so than the original comment implies.
On a different note - I was in the same boat as you and actually wrote an email to the league pass support address (did not get a reply yet) telling them that I had been a customer for years and would not be renewing this year because of the NBA's spineless capitulation to an authoritarian regime. I'm still disappointed they didn't respond correctly more quickly, Adam Silver really needed to make a strong statement over the weekend, but the statements he made earlier this week were much, much better. Unfortunate that it likely only happened because they underestimated the $$$ hit from American customers being pissed, and I'm under no illusion that anything but the bottom line is the primary concern, but I'm curious what you didn't like about Silver's most recent press conference. He pretty unequivocally said that the NBA will not infringe the free speech of its employees and gave the classic "sorry you were offended" non-apology-apology.
Part of me would have liked to see a stronger statement, but I'm also not sure it's the NBA's job to escalate an international relations issue, particularly when many of its players (including LeBron James, who has to be the most valuable asset the NBA currently has) were/are actually in China as this plays out.
I'm holding out a small bit of hope that there will be a stronger statement once no more NBA employees are in China. I have a couple of friends working in NBA front offices and a few rumors have reached their ears that the NBA is afraid to react too much for fear of retaliation in the form of players getting detained and stopped from leaving China (just to be clear, I have zero proof of this, but it seems logical).
On Morey, sure, basketball fans know who he is, and he’s a respected guy, but relative to say LeBron or Harden, in a list of Q scores, he’s certainly behind at least hundreds of other NBA personalities,
And this was a 2 line tweet,
Which again is blocked in China.
I maintain that had the Chinese government just ignored this, or stuck it behind the Great Firewall,
This would be a complete non-story.
Now millions of Chinese citizens are wondering why exactly they can watch the NBA games they enjoy (even if they don’t agree with Morey at all).
It couldn't be ignored because the kids of the elites there all have VPNs and access the real/free internet. Someone posted to social media there and it blew up. But no one asks how the tweet was seen in the first place and why access is only for the rich.
I'm glad Silver took his time and got it right. The response was perfect -- de-escalating, respectful, yet firmly refusing to get into policing their employees, as you say.
The NBA shouldn't be the vanguard of American foreign policy.
My ideal statement would have gone something like this:
"I (Adam Silver) support the principles of democracy and human rights, and stand with the people of Hong Kong in trying to secure those for themselves. The rest of the NBA stands with them as well. We apologize for responding to this incident incorrectly initially, we were deeply worried about losing the Chinese audience for many reasons. Our revenue and growth as an organization is certainly one of them, and additionally we feel that exposure to other cultures, even through the limited lens of broadcasted basketball games, can only be a positive thing for any people. But after some reflection, we've decided that the principles Daryl Morey was expressing support for when he tweeted are ones that we cannot in good conscience shy away from supporting as well, even at potential financial cost."
I realize that this is a pipe dream, and the NBA will never do it. But since you asked =)
You say that the NBA shouldn't be the vanguard of American foreign policy, and I don't disagree with that statement. But if the NBA were to hypothetically make a statement like the above, is that really them being the vanguard? Or is it a group of private citizens (organized under the banner of a for-profit corporation) deciding that there are certain principles they stand for as a company? And what's wrong with that?
Yeah, I'd call that type of statement being the vanguard, considering the US government is very much not getting involved in the HK matter.
Silver doesn't even have the right to speak for all NBA employees on the matter, which he wisely recognized. He should definitely not be getting out ahead of the State Dept.
Agree to disagree. To me there's nothing more American than citizens/organizations coming out in support of what they believe in, and forcing their representatives to either advocate on their behalf for those beliefs, or face the consequences come the next election. And of course he doesn't have the right to speak personally for all individual NBA employees, but he absolutely has the right to speak on behalf of the NBA itself and the resources it controls. He's actually the only person who does have the authority to do that, it's his job. And if any employees disagree with the direction the organization goes and the principles it chooses to stand for, they are free to seek employment elsewhere.
> [Silver] should definitely not be getting out ahead of the State Dept.
I hope I'm not misunderstanding you, but I can't find another way to read this other than that you think the NBA shouldn't take a stance because the US federal government hasn't taken one. This idea is extraordinarily dangerous in my opinion, and I am vehemently opposed to it.
I think the NBA shouldn't take a stance because shared love of basketball shouldn't be an international battleground. Even if you're taking a purely American POV, there's a reason we don't weaponize the Peace corps.
From a more global viewpoint.. there are reasons why a lot of Chinese get mad at the idea of westerners expressing an opinion over Hong Kong's system of rule. And it's not because they're brainwashed. Silver probably listened to their perspective, based on his wording.
One could be forgiven for not knowing such a perspective exists, given the HN threads on the matter.
This will be my last reply since it's quite clear we're at an impasse, but I assure you I have been exposed to many more perspectives than just HN, and frankly am offended that you would assume otherwise. I think it reflects poorly on the strength of your argument if you have to resort to "you disagree with me, you must not be as well informed as I am". Particularly when you proceed to not clarify in any way which perspectives you're referring to, it is a sign of arguing in bad faith.
Your comment reads to me as a very thinly veiled "shut up and dribble" [1]. Not quite identical, mostly due to the lack of racist undertones, but the idea is the same. If the NBA standing in support of democracy and human rights creates an "international battleground", the blame for that lies exclusively and totally with China, full stop. These are things worth going to battle over, whether within the context of the NBA, state department negotiations, or anything in between. Your point about weaponizing the peace corps is a complete non sequitur.
I understand, I think as well as any western person can, why the Chinese get upset about this. I'm familiar with their history of issues with territorial sovereignty particularly in the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries [2]. I simply completely disagree that said reaction is justified. People advocating for the right to govern themselves to some extent or another, particularly when the alternative is falling under the jurisdiction of an authoritarian regime, is justified precisely 100% of the time, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply wrong, or yes, brainwashed. Silver may have listened to other perspectives, but I'll eat my hat if he cared at all about them, as opposed to caring about the NBA's bottom line.
For the record, I wasn't assuming anything about your exposure to various ideas. Just didn't want to belabor the points. I was snarking the one-sidedness of the board a little bit.
If you wanted to hear what I was thinking:
1) Installing western-friendly government in HK achieves full naval encirclement of China (SK, JP, Phillipines, Taiwan, HK).
2) As you say, there's the history of colonialism, which gets compounded by the importance of 1).
3) We consistently ignore these things from our allies and then get all moralizing when it's strategically advantageous for us. 12 hours ago we let Erdogan invade kurdish syria, and that's just today. I could list another dozen countries/disasters that we're enabling right now.
4) Almost every time we have gotten involved in 'liberating' countries because our values are so great, it's not only had ulterior motivations but it's also been an absolute humanitarian disaster. We did this on their borders twice in the latter 20th century.
When you add all of that up, and mix in the post-colonial resentment.. I can see a reaction of "America in particular can kindly shut up about it". It's not that they can't comprehend democracy, it's that they specifically don't want any American involvement whatsoever.
I'm not saying you have to agree with them -- feel free to join a divestment movement or something -- but they do have their reasons, the issue isn't completely one-sided.
I appreciate that you're mostly sticking to the right side of posting respectfully, but you're still breaking the site guidelines by using HN primarily for political and nationalistic arguments. You've posted many dozens of comments in the last week, apparently about nothing else.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended? As you surely know, this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Political battle, especially about China, may be dominating the threads lately, but that's not a stable or ok situation—that's the needle going into the red, and we need accounts like yours to not just constantly be ramping that up and making it redder and redder. (I know you're not the only one.) If that happens, eventually the pressure hits a breaking point and the whole thing blows up. I had to go a long way back to find a comment that was distinctively about something else (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060328, if you're curious).
You've got a balance of hundreds of comments calling for civilizational confrontation. With dozens of actually racist comments in the mix as well. Over, what, 2 dozen threads in a few days?
Go ahead and ban me if you like but I'm not your problem here. That comment was, if I do say so, mind expanding compared to the raw emotion on display in these threads.
I think they are very, very afraid. I think they feel like one crack in the dam, and they could lose the whole country. Secure people (or nations) don't have to react like this.
I am not particularly well versed on Sino-American politics but this seems like a provocation related to the escalating trade war with America. I get the impression from the events of recent weeks that shared commerce and culture are being divided. China seems to be taking its profits, while collecting and consolidating power it has achieved in past decades. It feels like they are getting ready to isolate themselves to a greater degree than ever.
> It feels like they are getting ready to isolate themselves to a greater degree than ever.
There was a split in the road, one went to Dengville, the other went to Xiville. Xi, as a requirement of his personal pursuit of absolute power, chose to aggressively pursue the authoritarian Xiville route. Everything Xi is doing is for self-glorification and not for the benefit of China (which is why he's adjusting presented history and inserting himself everywhere in prominence; if he were actually selflessly serving China's interests, he wouldn't do any of that). Every dictator couches their words and actions in the flag of the betterment of the nation, and it ultimately never is. Before he's done, he will largely wipe out what Deng (and the leaders that followed after) accomplished in modestly liberalizing China.
As China's formerly fast, organic (low debt) growth naturally entirely ebbs away, Xi will have no choice but to begin accelerating cultural lock-down to control the restless population. That is already underway and has been for a few years. The social contract will be noticeably violated and the people will start to rebel. The CPC knows this and will try to stay out in front of it as much as possible.
No communist regime is even remotely close to caring about pleasing anyone. Very much the opposite, they'll do literally anything to make you please them.
They don't make sense nor try to. Then make power grabbing (and preserving).
You think the Chinese care about "annnoying" their people.
This is a totalitarian regime, which has ruthlessly run over its own people,there is no concept of individual rights, the populace is brainwashed into "nationalism" and that is all that matters. Country over self!
Western thought with its ideas of human rights and free speech is alien to them.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. It's low-quality and repetitive, and invariably turns nasty, and those things make it off topic here.
The NBA is hugely popular there, don't they risk annoying huge chunks of their own population by taking it off the air?
Morey is not even an especially notable NBA figure, Twitter doesn't even work in China, it would have been easy to block news of this in China. It seems like the reaction would cause a Streisand effect there.
Isn't a backlash among the US population over this plainly foreseeable? That doesn't seem like its in their interests.
Working off the assumption that the Chinese government is rational, why is its reaction here so strong?
What other things are about to happen, that make this reaction make sense?