With the world focused on China’s alleged human rights abuses, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is shaping up to be the most controversial Games in recent times
Wednesday, October 9, 2019. The lobby of Shanghai’s Ritz-Carlton bustles with journalists and National Basketball Association players, but instead of the festive mood the NBA was expecting as a result of making deeper inroads into the world’s second largest basketball market, the league finds itself embroiled in the biggest controversy of its 73-year history.
Beijing’s first move was to suspend the Rockets’ relationship with the Chinese Basketball Association, one cultivated by Shanghai-born Yao Ming, the towering centre who spent eight seasons with the Rockets and is credited with helping to bring the NBA to his homeland.
Morey’s tweet prompted condemnation from China’s consulate in Houston, and Chinese NBA fans called for the Rockets’ general manager to be fired.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver and league executives, holed up high in the Ritz-Carlton, work to broach the crisis with the Communist Party and salvage the NBA’s trip. Eventually, after hours of silence, an NBA China representative makes his way down the lobby escalator to a madding scrum, as Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets players, among them superstars Kyrie Irving and LeBron James, stand in confusion alongside members of the international press.
The spokesman declares, in Mandarin, that the day’s press conference will be “postponed”, and everyone scatters, uncertain whether any basketball will be played between the two NBA teams in China as planned. Meanwhile, across the street, workers tear down a giant NBA poster on the side of the Super Brand Mall.
That evening, hours after everyone has returned to their rooms, it is announced that the Lakers-Nets games scheduled for the following night at Shanghai’s Mercedes-Benz Arena, and on Saturday in Shenzhen, will go ahead. But the events take on a nationalistic tone, as some fans don LeBron James jerseys while others wave Chinese flags and paint their faces red with yellow stars.
The fallout between the NBA and China is just beginning. The crisis lingers throughout the 2019-20 season, with Chinese national broadcaster CCTV refusing to show NBA games up until the last two of the finals, when James and the Lakers take the franchise’s 17th title. (Tencent, the NBA’s exclusive rights holder in China for streaming, bans Houston Rockets games until they are defeated by the Lakers in the Western Conference semi-finals.)
Commissioner Silver, having returned to the United States after tense negotiations in Shanghai, concedes that he was pressured by the Communist Party to fire Morey, prompting an official denial from Beijing. The NBA’s relationship with China is put on life support, and if losing hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese broadcasting and merchandise rights off the backs of half a billion fans were not enough, Covid-19 soon arrives.
By the time the pandemic shuts down the NBA, on March 11, relations have not improved. Silver declares that he stands behind Morey’s right to freedom of expression, and the NBA’s July 30 restart amid the pandemic, branded a “Whole New Game”, portrays just how much the sporting landscape has changed in the intervening months.
03:26
Will China face a massive boycott over the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics?
In July, Bermudian three-time Olympic long jumper Tyrone Smith becomes the first athlete to tweet at World Athletics asking the body to axe its Diamond League meet in China until the law is repealed. In October, the official Juventus football fan club in Hong Kong is banned by the Italian Serie A side, after it is accused of violating club rules by supporting 2019’s anti-government protests via its official Facebook page.
Every image of its presence in international sports, as a competitor and a host, is designed to further China’s political messageDavid Mulroney, former Canadian ambassador to China
The event was a declarative statement of the nation’s power, imbued with militaristic and cultural pride: China had arrived as a major geopolitical player. The international press responded with equal parts awe and fear, and headlines such as The New York Times’ “China’s Leaders Try to Impress and Reassure the World”.
David Mulroney, Canada’s ambassador to China between 2009 and 2012, saw this first-hand as a diplomat operating within the Communist Party’s reach. Beijing regularly rolls out the red carpet for premier competitions and world championships, hosting elaborate events while courting dignitaries, celebrities, companies and sponsors. These are well-orchestrated, strategic initiatives with a specific goal: to ensure that China is seen as a global superpower on multiple fronts. First and foremost, they provide the Communist Party with an opportunity to tout its ideology.
“Every image of its presence in international sports, as a competitor and a host, is designed to further China’s political message,” says Mulroney. “That is true of other countries but nowhere is it more true than in China. Sport, like everything else, is put into the service of politics.”
The NBA’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement while continuing to deal with an authoritarian regime that is accused by many of a host of human rights abuses drew scorn, and has since become a political talking point in the US. The NBA’s apparent doublespeak on China was even called out by President Donald Trump, who accused the association and players of “pandering to China”.
“That is the stark reality of doing business in China,” explains Simon Chadwick, director of the Centre for the Eurasian Sport Industry at its business school in Shanghai. “To operate in China you are making a decision to deliver some type of product while in a highly politicised environment.”
Chadwick says there is no doubt that in dealing with China as a representative company or sporting body sends a clear message to the rest of the world: you are willing to put democracy aside for financial and strategic benefit. “Whilst compromising your normal ethical stance and principles might serve you well in China,” he says, “what it might do elsewhere in the world, is obviously to compromise your brand image, to compromise the perceptions that people have of you.”
Many Western politicians, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have called Xinjiang, located in China’s northwest, a police state, alleging that more than a million Uygur Muslims held in camps there have been subjected to indoctrination and sterilisation.
In September, more than 160 human rights groups from around the world called on the International Olympic Committee’s president, Thomas Bach, to revoke the 2022 Beijing Winter Games because of the situation in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang has also become an issue for the NBA, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based advocacy group, urging the league to “stand on the right side of history over Uygur oppression in Xinjiang”.
Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert – the 28-year-old Frenchman who was the first NBA player to be infected with Covid-19 – also came out against China’s treatment of Uygurs, sharing a post by French actor Omar Sy on Instagram that included the caption “wrong is wrong” on a light-blue background, similar to that of the flag of East Turkestan, the name many Uygurs use for Xinjiang.
Chadwick says the NBA’s political stance is now in stark contrast to its ongoing relationship with its largest overseas market. While Silver stood up to the Communist Party publicly, the issue continues to draw headlines. An ESPN exposé published in July featured NBA camps in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China where American coaches alleged human rights abuses took place.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban defended the NBA’s decision to continue doing business with the Communist Party during a podcast interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly last month.
Trump’s personal lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani made headlines after James and the Lakers won the title. “Wow the lakers won the nba championship?” the 76-year-old tweeted on October 12. “How about a big parade in Communist China, Beijing. That’s where it belongs.”
Chadwick says many commentators point to a degree of cherry-picking when it comes to which issues to support and which to ignore, depending on the cost-benefit analysis for the sports league in question.
“What’s interesting about the NBA is they are supporting some very progressive and important and vital issues in Western society, for example Black Lives Matter,” says Chadwick. “But then the NBA in China seems to be prepared to operate on a different basis, and what you get in the minds of fans, and consumers and commercial partners is this cognitive dissonance.”
Mulroney says, “I just can’t see how we can go to Beijing in 2022 if Xinjiang is still a prison colony. And with how Hong Kong has been silenced and neutralised and destroyed as a home for free expression, I just don’t see how that is possible.”
Other Western nations are mulling the same questions. Last month, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said British athletes may not compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics if evidence mounts of Uygurs being abused in China. Australian athletes are being urged by several of the country’s politicians to consider a boycott. Canberra has yet to issue a public statement but the subject is expected to be debated in parliament.
Canada is a medal contender in a number of high-profile events, including ice hockey, with National Hockey League (NHL) players scheduled to take part.
The NHL is the sixth biggest league in the world by revenue. Post Magazine contacted the league to ask whether it was aware of the situations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, but received no response.
Will Canadian superstars such as Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid, the two biggest names in the NHL, head to China to take part in the Olympics, knowing two of their countrymen are in detention in what is widely seen as a proxy geopolitical stand-off?
If sports figures do make their way to Beijing two years from now, they will find themselves faced with both the Communist Party and the International Olympic Committee’s Rule 50, which bans any political gestures or protest signals during a national anthem.
Malcolm Riddell, founder of CHINADebate, an American news site that follows current affairs in China, notes that the bullying tactics used by the party with leagues such as the NBA could backfire, isolating the nation when it comes to both sport and politics.
“China’s leaders believe sports is just politics by other means,” says Riddell. “But they don’t understand the politics of sports in democratic countries. They don’t understand that sports is a weapon that can be used against China. And if they don’t understand that, when it comes to sports and China, we have moved from ping-pong diplomacy to hardball, they soon will.”
