Last week’s “events” involving the NBA and China, ignited after Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for the Hong Kong protestors, thrust basketball diplomacy onto center stage. But omitted in all of the coverage analysis is that no one should be surprised that the Chinese government would take a stand when politics and international basketball intersected.
To be sure, there are several good big-context pieces out there, ranging from reports on U.S. multinational companies playing commercial ball in China and its implications to Denis Rodman’s offer to be pressed into diplomatic service to fix the NBA-China rift. I cannot believe I just wrote that last clause (but it is true!).
Missing, however, is any awareness of how any mixing of basketball and the NBA with politics were going to be a proverbial red line for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
#EverythingHasAHistory, and China’s long, proud basketball tradition, combined with its endurance across class and political parties, as well as basketball’s use by the CCP in diplomacy and international relations, meant that the sport would be on the frontlines of a clash of sports, politics, and multinational entities.
The country has a deep hoops history. For a quick background, read the relevant part of my November 2018 Sporting News article with insights from top China sports scholar Andrew D. Morris.
Since its arrival in Chinese port cities in the mid-1890s, basketball was embraced as a modern sport. “It was pretty fast as a game [to spread],” said historian Andrew D. Morris. “Basketball was seen as modern, as strong, a way to strengthen the population,” traits it was admired for by other cultures around the world.
The game’s focus on teamwork and bringing people together were attractive elements, especially in China. “The things that make us strong are the things where people come together on their own will and push each other to compete with each other,” he said, and sports fit that bill.
“It's what the world was doing, and that’s what that made sports so powerful at the time,” Morris noted. “People were happy to see basketball as something that’s vigorous.”
I’ve written on how the CCP engaged in #hoopsdiplomacy in its first overtures to the West through the 1966 basketball trips and tournaments with France. This was years before the more well-known Sino-American ping-pong diplomacy. I’ve written also (forthcoming) of the two countries’ use of the “orange ball” again in 1980 to shore up their sportive as well as diplomatic agendas. Amanda Shuman has pointed out how China used basketball, as well as sports in general, in its relations with Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s; and reports indicate that it was Chinese basketball coaches who helped train their Laotian and Cambodian counterparts in the 1960s. Long. Basketball Diplomacy. Tradition.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. China just hosted the FIBA World Cup, a major undertaking and a prominent example of hosting sporting mega-events as forms of sports diplomacy (see Stuart Murray’s excellent work on modern sports diplomacy at large). It has a top league (CBA, the Chinese Basketball Association) that attracts major global players, like NBA Champion Jeremy Lin, and is of course headed by former Rockets great Yao Ming.
If you thought that the Government of China would let any critique from the basketball world about the protests in Hong Kong, its human rights violations of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, or more pass by, think again. That’s why nobody should be surprised by the reactions from China over Morey’s tweet.