The NBA revealed that it no longer runs a basketball training center in the western region of China best known for the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged repression and genocide of its Uighur minority population.
Mark Tatum, the NBA’s deputy commission and chief operating officer, responded on Tuesday to a number of questions posed to NBA commissioner Adam Silver in a June 30 letter from Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn in which she said there was concern that the NBA had “turned a blind eye” to human rights abuses in China, which the country has denied.
“Your league’s business interests are closely intertwined with Communist China’s estimated $4 billion NBA market,” Blackburn, a Republican, said last month. “The actions of the NBA and some players have created an appearance that your league prioritizes profit over principle.”
Blackburn had pressed the NBA about its basketball training center for teenagers set up in 2016 in Xinjiang, which she called “one of the world’s worst humanitarian zones,” and asked what the NBA was doing “to shutter this location.”
Tatum said, “The NBA has had no involvement with the Xinjiang basketball academy for more than a year, and the relationship has been terminated.”
“China is responsible for some of the greatest human rights violations of our time. The NBA’s decision to abandon its footprint in Xinjiang, where millions of Muslim Uighurs have been brutally confined in ‘reeducation camps,’ is the right way to condemn Chinese oppression and should motivate other American corporations to decry such atrocities,” Blackburn said Tuesday. “Making money and standing up for human rights should not be mutually exclusive.”
Since 2017, as many as 2 million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities have been moved into detention camps, often referred to as concentration camps, in the western Xinjiang province of China. There, Uighurs are allegedly put through rigorous “de-radicalization” programs and are mocked and tortured by Chinese guards. But the camps are just one part of supposed large-scale surveillance and oppression inflicted on China’s Uighur population. The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly imposed forced birth control, sterilizations, and abortions on the Uighur population in a race-based effort to reduce the minority Muslim population in the country.
The United States has sanctioned the Chinese leaders responsible for and businesses involved in alleged Uighur human rights abuses.
Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey stirred controversy in October when he tweeted the “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong” slogan. The tweet was deleted, and various NBA owners, players, and even the league criticized Morey while declining to critique China. An NBA statement called the tweet “regrettable,” and LeBron James said that Morey was “misinformed.” But the Chinese government punished the NBA anyway, blocking the games from Chinese state-run television.
Blackburn had asked the NBA about the “financial consequences” of China Central Television now banning NBA games, and Tatum said “the financial impact of NBA games not airing on television in China has been significant” and “we estimate the loss of revenue to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The Republican senator said Wednesday that she appreciates “the NBA’s candor about the costs of confronting a censorship-obsessed communist regime.”
She had also pressed the league about its contract with Chinese state-owned tech platform Alibaba.
“The NBA, through its affiliate in China, has a multi-year contractual relationship with Alibaba that primarily concerns the distribution of NBA content on Alibaba’s digital platforms in China. This includes NBA game highlights and other NBA-related content that is produced by the NBA and Alibaba. The NBA also operates a store on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, through which NBA and NBA-team branded merchandise is sold to consumers in China,” Tatum said, also noting that Joseph Tsai, the owner of the Brooklyn Nets, is the executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group and a member of Alibaba’s board of directors.
Blackburn said Wednesday that “the NBA’s continued financial relationship with Alibaba requires a closer look.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sent a June 10 letter to the NBA criticizing the league’s “troubled history of excusing and apologizing for the brutal repression of the Chinese Communist regime” and pressing them on whether messages calling out Chinese malfeasance in Hong Kong or against the Uighurs would be allowed now that certain social justice slogans will be allowed on NBA players’ jerseys.
ESPN writer Adrian Wojnarowski responded to Hawley’s letter by emailing the senator to say, “F— you.” Wojnarowski apologized but was suspended by ESPN. Hawley has said he’d rather ESPN focused more on getting answers from the NBA rather than suspending its employees.
