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

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The NBA has faced a backlash from China, followed by one from the US over a perceived compromising of American values. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:51pm, 10 Oct 2019Updated: 10:21pm, 10 Oct 2019

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.

The since-deleted tweet supporting anti-government protesters in Hong Kong by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey has elevated the topic of China’s censorship among Americans in a bigger way than US President Donald Trump’s trade war has highlighted trade imbalances, intellectual property violations and a host of other issues the US government has been pressuring Beijing about for decades.

“Nobody knows what an entity list is,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Centre’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, referring to the US Commerce Department’s list of foreign firms that US companies are restricted from doing business with. “And everybody knows what the NBA is and who James Harden is, and they all know what South Park is.”

The Commerce Department has put more than 100 Chinese firms and public security bureaus on its entity list this year for activities that allegedly undermined American national security or repressed the human rights of religious minorities in China – issues that have resonated among lawmakers and Washington policymakers since before Trump started his trade war with China last year.

However, those matters have not dominated social media or talk show circuits as explosively as the NBA Twitter controversy that may lead to the end of the league’s business in China – a market it had been cultivating for decades – despite apologies from NBA players including the Rockets’ star player Harden, and evasive comments by Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.