NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is still unapologetically in favor of growing the league’s engagement with China to the point that he can’t (or won’t) recognize how incompatible China’s values are with what he claims the NBA stands for.
In an interview with Time magazine last week, Silver simply waved away the criticisms of the league’s coziness with China. He also insisted that boycotts “won’t further the agenda of those who seek to bring about global change” while giving a brief acknowledgment to the “legitimate criticisms” of the Chinese Communist Party. “The political science major in me believes that engagement is better than isolation.”
But Silver is too smart to believe in this naive world where the NBA can have a hand-in-hand relationship with China while carrying out its professed mission to “improve people’s lives through the game of basketball.” After all, we’re just over nine months away from the ESPN report that the NBA’s basketball academies in China were rife with abuse, a story that was simply shrugged off and forgotten just days after it broke.
It’s not about the NBA being able to “bring people together,” as Silver states. It’s about the NBA being able to bring the league and Chinese money together in a relationship the NBA has been cultivating for years.
Undeterred by the abuse at its Chinese basketball academies, the league’s new training center in China was opened earlier this month. Chinese state media claim that the league will participate in an international trade expo in China in the coming days. NBA players such as star Klay Thompson and the now-retired Dwyane Wade have endorsement deals with Chinese brands that use Chinese cotton made using slave labor in Xinjiang.
NBA games returned to Chinese broadcasters earlier this year as the league hopes to rebuild its lucrative financial relationship with China. Silver previously dismissed the league’s silence on China by saying that human rights abuses are just “one issue.” The real “one issue” Silver and the league care about is money, and former Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey issuing a single tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters cost the league at least $200 million in revenue from China.
Silver wants to make sure that never happens again. The league hasn’t spent the last decade searching for an heir to Chinese star Yao Ming to energize its Chinese fan base for nothing. You can be sure Silver won’t be pushed on this issue, as Time and others have previously shown. He’ll continue talking about “engagement” and “bedrock principles” while the league continues to show whatever amount of public cowardice it takes to get back into the good graces of China’s genocidal communist regime.
