The companies we keep

“I have tried to help the people of the world to make it a little better,” wrote James Naismith, basketball’s inventor, in 1918, reflecting on a life of Christian education and athletics. He would have choice words for today’s National Basketball Association, which recently caved to foreign pressure and condemned Americans speaking in favor of democracy abroad.

The league confirmed Thursday that the Chinese government had sought the dismissal of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey. His crime? Tweeting. “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong,” Morey had tweeted earlier this month.

His auto-da-fé at the hands of the NBA was swift. League officials apologized for having “deeply offended” those in China. Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta denounced Morey’s comments, promising “to play basketball and not to offend anybody.” Rockets star James Harden said, “We apologize. We love China.” On Wednesday, Superstar LeBron James condemned Morey’s tweet, warning that “many people could have been harmed, not only physically or financially, but emotionally and spiritually.”

Morey apologized and deleted the tweet.

The events cast into sharp relief Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in seeking the corporate subordination of core American values to Chinese market access.

The corporate motivation is obvious: China represents a billion-person market with an emerging middle class. The NBA began planning its China expansion in the late 1980s, and launched NBA China, with support from the Chinese Communist Party, in 2008. That subsidiary, following years of double-digit growth, is now worth some $4 billion. State-owned China Central Television, which the New York Times describes as “the Communist Party’s most influential propaganda mouthpiece,” airs games four nights each week. Last season, some 500 million Chinese reportedly watched an NBA game. The United States has a total population of 330 million.

Washington facilitated Beijing’s integration into the global economy with the assumption that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization. “See, I think that the commerce thing, I think it’s been wrongly positioned as are you choosing money over values,” President Bill Clinton said in 1996. “It seems to me that if America is in the center of these emerging networks, it dramatically increases our leverage to work with people for peace, for human rights and for stability in the world.”

Instead, expansion into China may have done more to change the companies than it has done to change China. Rather than expose Chinese audiences to the best of American ideas and exports, basketball has become a tool of Chinese power. Joe Tsai, co-founder of Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, became the full owner of the Brooklyn Nets in August. In a CCP-compliant Facebook post, he condemned Morey’s tweet. The Nets played LeBron James’s Lakers twice in China last week.

All told, it is difficult to imagine a comparable reaction were the roles reversed, and not simply because Twitter is banned in China. So long as American companies refuse to act on their convictions, and the U.S. imposes no cost on China’s behavior, the CCP has no reason to seek win-win solutions. Only a determined opposition will alter a counterpart’s conduct.

But Washington and the NBA have options short of cutting ties or escalating a trade war to compel Beijing to change its behavior. In negotiating future airing rights, for example, the NBA could secure freely purchased commercials during broadcasts and streams, creating pockets of free air amid crushing censorship. If companies stand firm and the CCP refuses, it will have to answer to citizens grown accustomed to American clothes, films, and sports.

The federal government, meanwhile, can welcome Chinese businesses — foreign values and all — while drawing the line at gross human rights violations. Last Monday, the Department of Commerce listed 28 Chinese entities persecuting China’s Uighur citizens, determining that they were “acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States.” These restrictions, if used sparingly and with extensive public explanation, push companies to answer publicly for their activities, or abandon the U.S. market.

U.S. officials can also speak out. They could name the companies hewing entirely to CCP preference, giving Americans the information to act as conscientious consumers. Regarding the NBA, Democratic presidential candidates like Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang have denounced the NBA’s response to Morey’s tweet. Republican Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley released blistering statements as well. Other politicians should join them.

At the grassroots level, citizens and consumers can start publicly asking questions. Why does the NBA currently run a training camp in the capital of Xinjiang Province, where the CCP operates what the U.S. has called “concentration camps?” Why was the NBA’s Chinese-language apology far more strident than its English one? If free expression is core to the NBA, will its star players — and perhaps its next Chinese star — speak out about human rights abuses? Will the league permit it?

Now, the NBA is recalibrating by engaging in damage control. It released another statement aimed at an American audience invested — if only temporarily and recently — in league policies. “Values of equality, respect and freedom of expression have long defined the NBA,” it intoned. On Thursday, the league’s commissioner insisted, “American values … travel with us wherever we go.”

But the tape, as they say, tells a different story. When a CNN reporter asked Houston’s James Harden whether the incident would affect his political activism, a hand grabbed the microphone and a voice instructed, “basketball questions only.” When asked the same, Houston coach Mike D’Antoni deflected. “I coach basketball, I’m not a diplomat,” he said.

A diplomat he is not, but then, neither were the fans removed from NBA games in Washington and Philadelphia for quietly protesting for Hong Kong. In keeping the NBA in the news, these civilians challenge the corporate assumption that they matter but don’t mind. Companies now have to choose: either answer to the public or reveal their true minder. And that might not be a bad thing.

Mikhael Smits is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @mikhaelsmits. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.