Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke Are Both Pretty Disgusted About the NBA Pandering to China

On Friday, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey posted on Twitter about his support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that have resulted in violent clashes with police during the last four months. “Fight for Freedom,” Morey wrote. “Stand with Hong Kong.”

That’s hardly incendiary political rhetoric, yet the statement provoked the Chinese Basketball Association to suspend its partnership with the Rockets—one of the country’s most popular NBA teams since Yao Ming was a star in Houston—and Tencent, the NBA’s digital partner in China, announced it would end media coverage of the team. That’s a big deal for a league that sees major growth opportunity in the Chinese market, and it’s made even one of the league’s best GMs potentially expendable.

Morey’s job reportedly is in jeopardy as NBA owners, Rockets star James Harden, and the league itself have rebuked him. While NBA commissioner Adam Silver vowed that “Daryl Morey is supported in terms of his ability to exercise his freedom of expression,” he stopped well short of supporting the content of that expression. Morey felt the need to delete the tweet and issue a new statement in which he apologized to anyone whom he’d offended and acknowledged that he was considering other perspectives on the Hong Kong protests.

From an American point of view, signaling support for the demonstrators in Hong Kong, who are protesting the Chinese government’s attempts to curtail the autonomous region’s independence, isn’t controversial. But that’s not the way many people in China feel about it, and it’s definitely not the way the Chinese government sees it. The authoritarian nation has a history of using its economic power to curtail the political speech of outsiders fearful of losing access to its consumers.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/ted-cruz-and-beto-orourke-nba-rockets-china-controversy/