Hong Kong, China, and the NBA
By now, many have speculated, read, or at the very least glanced at the amount of coverage on Hong Kong. It’s a complicated issue, with books likely being written right this instant on the protests that are drifting between the line of violent and non-violent depending on which news source tells which story.
Hong Kong is and will be till at least 2047, a complicated thorn in the Chinese Government. A short and very vague summary is that it was owned by the British until 1997. An expiring deal, which was agreed upon by the British and Chinese governments effectively allowed China to retake ownership of Hong Kong as long as certain specific conditions were maintained within the city and neighboring countryside. China willingly agreed and thus the handing over of Hong Kong was completed.
Once the agreement, and date of the handover was agreed upon by both countries, Hong Kong saw a flight from those who wished to not be under the rules of the Chinese Government. Emigration out of the country swelled as those how could afford to leave did and thus left a large lot of people with no way out unfortunately stuck in an economic downturn of their own self making. It’s also a good check on how the public viewed Chinese laws and governance as a whole, simply by asking “Why leave a place when you’re doing very well there?” (1)
So why the protests? Why the NBA?
Simply put, China needed Hong Kong in 1997, and now it doesn’t. The balance between the two has shifted in China's favor as China’s economy has risen to astronomical amounts. In 1997, Hong Kong represented 18.4% of the GDP of China. In 2015, they were 2.7%.(2) This has dropped more as time has gone on but if you’re still here then you kind of see the imbalance in this. Since China’s dominance in the markets has risen yet Hong Kong hasn’t, the overall influence Hong Kong has in Chinese affairs diminishes with it. Their ability to bargain with the most powerful tool they have, money, is no longer effective. It shows, as China since overcoming Hong Kong in the GDP percentages overall has started to ignore the agreement it has with Hong Kong, the “Basic Law”.
This is where the protests begin with China. No longer beholden to the interests of Hong Kong or their basic law, the PRC saw fit to ignore it. From 97 to 2002, worries of civil rights violations by the government saw protests in the streets every July 1st. It was grassroots, organized by the vague Civil Rights Front. From there however, things began to grow wit the divide between China and Hong Kong as the catalyst. 2003 saw the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, and a possible injunction against Free Speech. They protested for Universal Sufferage, Democracy, Civil Rights, and continued to do so every year henceforth. Every single leader who’s role was to govern Hong Kong saw themselves challenged for every decision they made in their handling of Hong Kong and more to the point, the handling of the situations was very much in line with which started the protests in the first place, Tienanmen Square.
If you want more for that, John Oliver summed it up nicely enough. LINK
So finally, with a buried lede we come to the last part of this. The NBA, which up until a few weeks ago of this article’s writing, was happy to just be playing games internationally. The NBA has a significant stake in the Chinese market. Somehow, Stephon Marbury and Kobe Bryant are spoken in the same sentence as GOATs (Not mountain goats, Greatest of All Time). It’s here that we get a moment of true understanding in how fragile China is about certain things. Hong Kong protests in the global media are just that, shown, reported on, and generally shown without censorship. As Oliver has shown, China will do a lot to hide any and everything about their sordid history to their people. Mao Zedong, despite everything in the country being his ideas, is downplayed or at the very least… invoking mixed feelings.(3)
That sort of behavior is what brought about this whole thing with the NBA. Anyone can partner with the Chinese but any such criticism of them, their policies, or their leader Xi Jinping and you can have an international incident on your hands, as brought out by a single tweet.
That single image has cost the NBA millions of dollars and led to the commissioner of the NBA issuing a statement that itself is quite shocking. He’s not punishing Morey, he’s not punishing anyone for speaking out. The line hasn’t been fully drawn but at least some precedent has been laid out. You now have Hongkongers in the United States protesting at NBA games. (4)
This is still an ongoing story, it’s still happening, it’s still moving forward and most likely will not stop.
I finish with this. I took a class on Revolutionary China, we discussed at length several topics but none of them were Hong Kong. I devoted a good portion of my research paper to Hong Kong and its current state of affairs and found that if this continues, Hong Kong itself will lose its individuality granted to it. While Hong Kong may have been created by imperialistic powers and governed by those very same powers, it in and of itself is purely unique. That uniqueness was agreed upon by Britain and China to be preserved for the handover in 1997. That agreement, by those still left in Hong Kong, is being voided everyday by rights violations and abuses. The government that controls Hong Kong currently wants to integrate it with China in a not-so-slow manner anymore. It’s leaders are mainland Chinese who are hand picked by the PRC to just that. A way of life that’s inconvenient for a government and is slowly being leveled is in effect a breach of the contract that was agreed upon, to Hong Kong and now globally the detriment of many.
Works Cited
(1) Siu-lun, Wong. “Emigration and Stability in Hong Kong.” Asian Survey 32, no. 10 (1992): 918–33. doi:10.2307/2645049.
(2) Bland, Ben. “Hong Kong since the Handover in Charts.” Financial Times. Financial Times, June 28, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/7e2422b8-5bb1-11e7-9bc8-8055f264aa8b.
(3) Lim, Louisa “Mao Stirs Mixed Feelings in Modern China” NPR September 9, 2006 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6043679
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=KKby0c6YXos
