How NBA crisis crystallises US-China culture clash better than the trade war
- Wrath felt by US basketball over Houston Rockets employee’s tweet exposes pitfalls of doing business in China
- Incident brings home to Americans the realities of issues such as censorship and the Communist Party’s demands on private companies
Washington’s flood of ill will towards Beijing may be spilling onto America’s streets, according to pundits and policymakers measuring the impact of the Twitter post that sparked the National Basketball Association’s China crisis.
“I also understand that there are consequences from that exercise of his freedom of speech. We will have to live with those consequences,” Silver added, making the league’s response the most prominent defiance of Beijing’s hard line on political expression since Google largely abandoned its China business nearly a decade ago.
Google exited the Chinese mainland in 2010 after refusing to comply with the Chinese government’s order to censor its search results. Beijing subsequently blocked Google’s services on the mainland.
Trump remarked on the controversy on Wednesday, criticising those who “were pandering” to China and keeping the issue in the headlines.
“They have to work out their own situation. The NBA, they know what they’re doing,” Trump said in his first public comment on the fallout the league has endured in China. “I watched the way that Kerr and Popovich and some of the others were pandering to China, and yet to our own country, it’s like they don’t respect it.”
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also chimed in, encouraging more companies operating in China to question Beijing’s edicts.
“I think American businesses are waking up to the risks” inherent in compliance with the Chinese government’s rules, Pompeo said, according to the transcript of an interview he did on the television programme PBS NewsHour on Wednesday.
What’s at stake for the NBA in the Hong Kong-China stand-off?
“It may seem that it makes profits in the short run, but the reputational costs … will prove to be higher and higher as Beijing’s long arm reaches out to them and destroys their capacity for them, their employees – in the NBA’s case, team members and general managers – to speak freely about their political opinion,” Pompeo said.
China’s wrath has also been directed at another American cultural institution while the NBA controversy has flared.
American television channel Comedy Central screened an episode of its popular animated series South Park called “Band in China”, which mocked censorship in the country. Chinese authorities quickly scrubbed all references to the show from internet sites and social media platforms, while discussion forums about the series were removed or shut down.
“What used to be the gap between the hard consensus on China in Washington and the ambivalence or bias towards a positive perspective on the street, that gap is closing,” Jude Blanchette, chair in China studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said.
“This contretemps over the NBA may well be the issue that brings them together, because packed into it is issues of censorship and a values clash and of the Communist Party using private companies to enforce its political mandates,” said Blanchette, who is also the author of China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong.
Money or moral high ground? NBA can’t have both
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, agreed that the past week had created a wider cultural rift between the US and China.
“I cannot emphasise enough how important this NBA moment is,” said Bannon, who also co-founded the Committee on the Present Danger: China, a group that advocates for a decoupling of the US and Chinese economies.
“It cuts so against the American sense of fairness. Eighty per cent of the American population was probably not focused on Hong Kong as much, but now, over the past 72 hours they're getting immersed in it and coming down hard in solidarity with the protesters.”
Additional reporting by Owen Churchill