Opinion | The World’s Wokest Sports League Bows to China

The N.B.A.’s official Chinese apology, put out on the social media site Sina Weibo (China’s version of Twitter), was something to behold: “We are extremely disappointed in the inappropriate comment by the general manager of the Houston Rockets,” it said. Mr. Morey “undoubtedly seriously hurt the feelings of Chinese basketball fans.”

All of this comes just as the Los Angeles Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets are headed to China for a two-game exhibition. The Nets are owned by Joe Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba, who weighed in on the Morey controversy in a long Facebook post that called the tweet “damaging,” the democracy protesters a “separatist movement” and the subject of Hong Kong’s independence a “third-rail issue.”

That an Alibaba chief sees the situation this way — the company’s technology has been used by the Chinese government to surveil its citizens — should not come as a surprise to anyone. The question is how an American league that prides itself on promoting progressive values squares those values with allowing an apologist for authoritarianism to own one of its teams. What’s more, why is a league run by a commissioner who rightly criticized President Trump’s Muslim travel ban for going “against the fundamental values and the fundamental ingredients of what makes for a great N.B.A.” also running a training camp for young players in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, amid camps of a far different kind?

Woke politics often seems to train our collective attention down on our navels rather than out at the world. Is the issue of gender-neutral bathrooms really as morally urgent as a country that is, as Pete Buttigieg sharply put it, “using technology for the perfection of dictatorship?” This is a worldview that encourages companies to take cost-free stands on the progressive cause of the moment and do absolutely nothing to uphold fundamental progressive values when doing so requires more sacrifice than the time it takes to write up a news release. A worldview that fails to force companies like the N.B.A., Apple, Google and Disney to account for the fact that they are serving as handmaidens to totalitarians is not one worth taking seriously.

The longstanding conventional wisdom on China — that engagement and investment by America in China would inevitably lead to the country’s political liberalization — has simply not proven true. This is the chestnut Adam Silver himself insists on, when he speaks about the possibilities of “basketball diplomacy.”

Alas, just the opposite has happened.

China has become more repressive the more it has engaged with the West. Meantime, that economic engagement has led major Western businesses and institutions to keep quiet on a major moral issue of this century. The N.B.A.-China partnership is just one example of so many in which Beijing is calling the shots.

Real political wisdom on this score lies with the creators of “South Park,” who, having offended China with an episode this week, dunked on the N.B.A.’s cravenness.

“Like the N.B.A., we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts,” said Trey Parker and Matt Stone in a statement. “We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t just look like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now, China?”

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