NBA officials and teams are “coming around” to recognizing the human rights abuses committed by the Chinese Communist Party, according to the State Department’s lead official for religious liberty.
“The NBA is making some proper steps,” Ambassador Sam Brownback told the Washington Examiner. “I didn’t like some of their early steps, but these things take time in a democratic country.”
That’s a gentler tone than NBA officials have learned to expect from Republican lawmakers and officials in recent months, as the league has become a political lightning rod by embracing the Black Lives Matter movement while flinching from condemning the repression of the Chinese Communist Party. Last month, the league announced that it had severed ties with basketball academies in Xinjiang, the region where Beijing has established “reeducation camps” for Uighur Muslims on a scale that has drawn comparisons to the Holocaust.
“They’re coming around,” Brownback said. “This isn’t unusual in a democratic system, where you have lots of independent actors, for it to take a little time for people to kinda convince themselves of what the right course of action is.”
The NBA found itself at the center of a political and geopolitical tumult last year when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sent a tweet in support of the Hong Kong protesters who oppose the mainland Chinese government’s erosion of their traditional freedoms. The league’s effort to mollify Beijing while refusing to condemn Chinese human rights abuses outraged Republican lawmakers, particularly in the context of high-profile players and coaches — with the approval of NBA leadership — displaying their support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The controversy expanded last week when an ESPN investigation showed that the players at the NBA academies in Xinjiang were abused by Chinese coaches. NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum refused to say whether human rights abuses contributed to the league’s decision to leave the region.
“My job, our job, is not to take a position on every single human rights violation, and I’m not an expert in every human rights situation or violation,” Tatum said. “I’ll tell you what the NBA stands for: The values of the NBA are about respect, are about inclusion, are about diversity. That is what we stand for.”
Brownback suggested that the abuse in the academies is a natural consequence of the Chinese Communist Party’s governing ideology.
“When a country doesn’t value human rights, there are direct, real-world consequences on individuals,” Brownback said. “And that’s happening there in Xinjiang and in their basketball academies and the way the attendees to that were treated … You’ve got a totalitarian regime that’s been in power for 70 years in China that is controlling, and it runs over people.”
Still, he made a point not to criticize the NBA’s hesitance to comment directly on China’s human rights abuses, saying that he preferred to let the league’s develop new positions more organically.
“It’s more durable, then, too, on people’s actions when they convince themselves ‘we need to go a different route,’” he said.
