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Sarnak
Join Date: Mar 2019
Location: England
Posts: 221
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NBA Hong Kong row reveals China's control of corporate America They aren't taking our lunch money right folks?
Quote:
In the late 1980s David Stern, then NBA commissioner, offered to let China to broadcast the league’s games on state television.
Basketball was popular in the country (Mao had been a fan) and Mr Stern saw a chance to get a foothold in an expanding market.
He was sensitive to the charge of pandering to a repressive regime with a grim human rights record, particularly for a league that has always been vocal on social issues.
But the money won out.
"Believe me, the China situation bothers me,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “But I have a responsibility to my owners to make money. I can never forget that, no matter what my personal feelings might be."
Thirteen years later and that conflict has come to a head.
On Friday, current commissioner Adam Silver revealed that Beijing had asked him to fire Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, after Mr Morey sent a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong.
The latest revelation followed a week of outrage on both sides of the Pacific, with NBA supporters in America appealing to the league not to bow to Chinese pressure.
In the end Mr Silver’s response was blunt - “We said there’s no chance that’s happening. There’s no chance we’ll even discipline him.”
But the episode has created an awakening in the West about the extent of Chinese influence over American corporations, which has metastised through Hollywood, the gaming, hotel and airline industries, big tech, automobile makers, and others.
Corporate America is facing accusations that is sacrificing free speech in order to make a buck in the East.
"The NBA episode just emphasised the clash between the effort to stick up for Western values and the desire of companies, not just corporate America but multinationals, to serve their bottom line," said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"This really impacted Americans in a way that other incidents hadn't because of America's love of sport. But this is not a new problem. The Chinese are trying to ride this, to use it to stoke nationalism, and spread support for the Chinese communist party. This is a playbook they've been using for several years, it works, and they're going to use it more."
With the exception of the odd executive American companies have shown little desire to uphold the ideals of the West in the face of Chinese pressure.
And, when they do, they have not been treated sympathetically by their own employers. The dollar, or in this case the yuan, rules.
For many US industries the Chinese market, with its 1.4 billion customers, is the Holy Grail.
Over the next 20 years China will need more than 6,000 new airplanes, a market worth around $1 trillion. In 2020, China's film market will for the first time eclipse North America as the biggest in the world, raking in over $12 billion at the box office.
In recent years Apple has sold up to a quarter of its iPhones in China. Starbucks has over 3,000 stores there, its biggest market outside the US. Nike made $1.38 billion in China last year, 70 per cent of it from shoes.
In exchange, China has expected an acquiescence from these corporations on politically sensitive topics, particularly those surrounding its geographic sovereignty.
Last year, Marriott International, which has over 100 hotels in China, had its website shut down for a week after the Cyberspace Administration internet watchdog found it had listed Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong as separate countries from China.
Marriott's apology was unequivocal. It said: "Marriott International respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. We don’t support separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. "We sincerely apologise for any actions that may have suggested otherwise."
Beijing also threatened to sanction US airlines - American, Delta, and United - unless they made changes to how they classified Taiwan on their websites. They all did.
A wave of luxury brands recently released statements apologising for a variety of perceived slights against China, among them Givenchy, Calvin Klein, Versace and Swarovski.
Hollywood studios hold a special place among those prepared to go the extra mile not to offend China.
In 2016, Marvel Studios cast Tilda Swinton to play a character in "Doctor Strange" who was originally supposed to be from Tibet. C. Robert Cargill, the screenwriter, said to make the character Tibetan would "risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bulls--t, and risk the Chinese government going, 'We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political.'"
The method of control works both ways. When Top Gun: Maverick came along, US fans quickly spotted that Tom Cruise's jacket was without the Taiwanese flag it had borne in the original film 30 years earlier. The sequel was partly produced by the Chinese production company Tencent Pictures, which also funded "Wonder Woman".
The pressure has become more aggressive in recent years, as China has opened up to the Internet, making it more difficult for corporations to tailor their messages to a geographic audience.
"China used to only worry about speech and behaviour that occurred in China, and in Chinese," said Scott Kennedy, a Washington-based authority on the Chinese economy. "Now, it's speech and behaviour that occurs anywhere, even in English, even on platforms Chinese people can't have access to legally. The Chinese expansion of its propaganda and censorship system is the biggest change."
That includes an army of concerned Chinese citizens scouring the internet for offensive acts by foreign companies.
It was a Tweet - just seven words long - that landed the NBA in China's bad books.
"Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong," Mr Morley wrote on Twitter on Oct 4, in reference to the months of anti-Beijing protests that have rocked the semi-autonomous city.
In an instant, the NBA's lucrative relationship with China - it accounts for about 10 per cent of net revenue and growing - imploded. China cancelled TV coverage of NBA games. Chinese advertisers, taking their cue from the government, ran for the hills.
Mr Morley's tweet was subsequently deleted, and a statement on Weibo, China’s alternative to Twitter, said the NBA was "extremely disappointed" by the "inappropriate" comment.
But there were hints that the league's response would diverge from the standard grovelling retraction. A statement in English merely said the situation was "regrettable".
The NBA later said it would not "regulate what players, employees and team owners say."
On Friday, Mr Silver said losses from the fallout had been “fairly dramatic”, and were continuing, but he stuck by the NBA's position.
The NBA’s stance has won support among its fans in the US, and even brought the Hong Kong protest movement into mainstream consciousness. Some started taking "Free Hong Kong" signs to games.
Last week Marco Rubio, the Republican senator, accused China of "using access to market as leverage to crush free speech globally".
He was speaking after gaming company Activision Blizzard, in which Tencent has a stake, suspended an e-sports player who shouted "Liberate Hong Kong" in Mandarin during a live broadcast. His $10,000 prize money was withdrawn.
Mark Kern, a prominent former Blizzard employee, led vocal opposition to the move and urged other gamers to "rise up" to protect free speech, despite the risks to his own business investments.
Mr Kern, who is ethnically Chinese, wrote on Twitter: "We are in a situation where unlimited Communist money dictates our American values. We censor our games for China, we censor our movies for China. Now, game companies are silencing voices for freedom and democracy.
"I take a huge risk by saying this. China monitors all social media and I know this means that we will probably never get an investment from China for my new MMO [multiplayer online game], and probably never get a licence to operate there."
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10-19-2019, 06:48 AM
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