Blood Money: How America’s Sports Owners Are in Bed with Communist China

[mystery-ak]

Blood Money: How America’s Sports Owners Are in Bed with Communist China

Lara Gwinn 17 Apr 2022

There is no question that basketball is China’s most popular sport. “Roughly 800 million people in China tuned into an NBA game. … That’s more than twice the population of the United States,” NBC News reported in 2019. That was before Daryl Moray sent his simple tweet, “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong,” in October of 2019 and started a firestorm that would shake the NBA to its core and begin a nearly 18-month-long ban on NBA games aired on Chinese television.

This was also before ESPN exposed Brooklyn Nets Owner Joe Tsai this week, in a report titled “Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is the face of NBA’s uneasy China relationship.” Tsai, who also owns WNBA’s New York Liberty and the San Diego Seals of the National Lacrosse League, is worth $8.5 billion, mostly from his Amazon-esque company Alibaba, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, with a revenue of over $700 billion per year. Tsai is among many owners in the NBA and other sports associations who have shown public support for protest movements that are publicly critical of America’s supposed human rights struggles, while at the same time covering up, and in some cases defending, China’s abysmal human rights record.

ESPN reported that Tsai’s “efforts to support the social justice movement in the U.S. come into conflict with statements he made about the personal freedoms of Chinese citizens and the silence around the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of the Communist country.”

Human rights groups have warned the world of the government-led atrocities against Uyghur people in China’s Xinjiang region, where reports of concentration camps, forced labor, torture, rape, sterilization, and assimilation have plagued the Chinese Communist state for many years. As a result, pressure mounted on the Chinese government during the Beijing Olympics, dubbed the “Genocide Games,” to stop the inhumane treatment.

“The NBA is a fan-first league,” wrote Tsai. “When hundreds of millions of fans are furious over an issue, the league, and anyone associated with the NBA, will have to pay attention,” Tsai said, presumably referring to fans only in China.

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https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2022/04/17/blood-money-how-americas-sports-owners-in-bed-communist-china/

[mountaineer]

LeBron James is the king — of hypocrisy when it comes to China
By Rich Lowry   
November 29, 2021 7:35pm

Nike’s latest TV ad is another slick paean to individual empowerment and prevailing despite the naysayers.

Centered around Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant, the commercial features various people doubting that Morant can keep up his stellar play, to which someone always cheekily replies, “Says who?”

Yes, Nike believes anything is possible — so long as it doesn’t involve doing anything to cross one of the world’s most hideously repressive regimes.

The grotesque hypocrisy of the Nike-NBA industrial complex and its biggest star, LeBron James, has been underlined in recent weeks by Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter, who has been on a one-man crusade against the Chinese Communist Party and those too cowardly or greedy to call it out.

James — the owner of four NBA championship rings, who has appeared in a jaw-dropping 10 NBA finals and is perhaps the greatest of all time — has views on all sorts of public controversies and doesn’t hesitate to air them so long as they are comfortably within the fashionable woke consensus.

On China, though, he’s mute. So are his employers. They all portray themselves as champions of social justice and of courage and striving, but their commitment to these causes and values stops at the water’s edge — and at their bottom line.  ...

NY Post