Games are streamed live and Chinese media cover all the league's biggest events such as All-Star weekend and the NBA Finals. "They have to look the other way on some pretty atrocious actions on the part of the Chinese Communist Party," he said. The league has played preseason games there for years, has three NBA academies in the country — designed to find the next star prospect — and big-name players go there every offseason to promote their brand. Silver could remain defiant, and perhaps triumphant after apparently getting the Chinese government to back down a little by Saturday’s game. The NBA’s continued financial relationship with Alibaba requires a closer look.”. “We’re not taking about a couple [former … Kiffin and Ole Miss lost to Auburn 35-28 in Oxford on Saturday. The Xinjiang Flying Tigers reportedly courted Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade in 2018, but failed to come to an agreement. The NBA has ended its relationship with a basketball academy in a province of China where human rights abuses are alleged. Eleven of NBA China's local partners have suspended or ended their relationship with the league. Legal Statement. The NBA debuted its partnership with a training camp in Urumqi, as well as two other Chinese cities, in 2016, calling it “an international elite development initiative.” The training camp would reportedly scout for talent in the Uyghur autonomous region and give otherwise underprivileged player the opportunity to play with NBA-level coaching talent. Tencent and CCTV continue to broadcast NBA games per the terms of their contracts with the NBA, ensuring that revenue comes in but perhaps working out a deal to block the Rockets from appearing before Chinese audiences. The move comes on the heels of a damning exposé finalized earlier this year by the seven-person, London-based China Tribunal...[which] determined with 'certainty beyond a reasonable doubt' that 'in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time,'" she continued. Rubio noted that the NBA was likely in the same position as a lot of other large corporations that do business with China under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its rules. Staff members clean the court floor before an NBA exhibition game between the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, China, October 10, 2019. Other American corporations start taking heat for deals in China that come with a side order of free speech repression, taking the singular focus off of the NBA. What steps is the NBA taking to shutter this location? The future of the NBA’s relationship with China has 2 real options, Sign up for the Teams could stop confiscating signs now that the Chinese basketball teams have left the United States. “The NBA’s partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba remains a cause for concern, especially as Alibaba affiliate AntPay prepares for an IPO this year on Shanghai’s STAR market,” Blackburn noted. CCTV has stopped all broadcasts of NBA games since the tweet in October, and Silver said earlier this year that the issue has cost the league a “substantial” amount that he described as “probably less than $400 million.”. The NBA is out of China. The NBA and China have a deep and long history, dating back to the 1980s, when former commissioner David Stern began forging a relationship with China … This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. It’s very important that we give back as well.”, Silver hoped that the players trained at the center could “bring glory to their country through the national team.”. The Rockets also loom large over all of … But what happens next in the saga should set the tone the relationship. Many in Washington view the NBA as a key entity in future government relations with China, a sort of leverage point that America may hold against the communist regime. That’s very, very Falcons, 5 winners and 3 losers from Week 7 in the NFL. "Earlier this month, two Uighur activist organizations – the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement and the East Turkistan Government in Exile – filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Beijing leadership, alleging that the top brass had committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uighurs, including the stealing of organs from the mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group and urging an inquiry," wrote Hollie McKay. In response to Blackburn's question about the academy in Xinjiang -- where reportedly roughly a million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority, are being held in what have been described as concentration camps -- Mark Tatum, the NBA's deputy commissioner, wrote: "The NBA has had no involvement with the Xinjiang basketball academy for more than a year, and the relationship has been terminated. This will all likely cool down for now. All Rights Reserved. Silver will address the matter at a news conference Tuesday in Japan, where the Rockets are playing this week. NBA Deputy Commissioner and Chief Operating Officer Mark Tatum revealed the defunct status of the NBA training center in Urumqi in a letter sent to Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Tuesday, published a day later on Blackburn’s website. While commending Silver’s prudent decision in March to suspend the NBA season, Blackburn believes that details on its relationship with China are “imperative” as the league reconvenes. While Tatum insisted that the NBA had cut its ties to the Xinjiang training center “more than a year ago,” the NBA boasted of having a presence in Xinjiang on its website as recently as October. A heretofore lucrative relationship among the NBA, its business partners and their counterparts in China. Stern even talked about having an NBA-sponsored or branded league in China. Something tells me, though, that the NBA won’t be champing at the bit to talk more about what happened in the aftermath of Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet. A U.S. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. Now, about 200 NBA employees work in China in offices in Beijing and Shanghai. On the heels of a bombshell report from ESPN alleging China's NBA training academies abused their young players, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is calling on the United States to reexamine its relationship with the East Asian power player. How the Magic went from the Finals to the NBA’s worst team in 4 years. First, the Chinese government continues towards a detente, feeling as though it has made its point, no matter what continues to happen in Hong Kong or Xinjiang. Chinese officials also emphasized the alleged importance of cultivating basketball talent in the heart of Uyghur country. Since 2007, the NBA has held preseason games in the country each year except one. 3. You can find her on Twitter at @JuliaElenaMusto. The NBA’s business relationship with China is reportedly worth more than $4 billion. The Xinjiang concentration camps, which the Communist Party also refers to as “training centers,” are believed to have housed as many as 3 million ethnic Uyghurs and other minorites from the region. Wherever the NBA-China relationship goes from here, the league lost its high ground to the NFL and every other sports league in our country. The milder activity at the camps includes communist indoctrination in which witnesses say they are forced to pledge loyalty to the Communist Party dictator Xi Jinping and renounce their Uyghur language and their Islamic faith. The NBA and China have a deep and long history, dating back to the 1980s, when former commissioner David Stern began forging a relationship with China Central Television (CCTV) to broadcast the league’s games. The NBA is enormously popular in China: Oft-cited figures from basketball executives in both the U.S. and China say that 300 million people play the game recreationally there and that about 500 million Chinese watched at least one NBA game last season. “Xinjiang has a large basketball fanbase, and our professional teams in the CBA [Chinese Basketball Association] and WCBA are among the top teams in China,” the director of the Xinjiang basketball center, Nie Chun, said at the time. Tsai could press the NBA to crack down on any criticism of China. But it hit a snag last fall, when Rockets general manager Daryl Morey created a stir by tweeting a message encouraging his followers to “stand with Hong Kong,” an independent region that for more than a year now has entered into pro-democratic protests against Beijing. The brief letter answered some questions the senator posed about the NBA’s relationship with China, under intense scrutiny since the sports organization failed to defend Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey from Communist Party outrage over a tweet in which he expressed sympathy with anti-communist protesters in Hong Kong. All rights reserved. Kerr and Popovich, wise and conscious of their images as worldly truth-speakers, could decide now that all NBA players are out of the country, they can be more critical of China. As a result of Morey’s remarks, the Communist Party banned the airing of NBA games on state television, which Tatum told Blackburn caused “significant” financial damage to the NBA. ESPN just dropped an atomic bomb on the NBA’s China relationship. NBA China, which launched in 2008 and handles the league’s business ventures in the country, is worth more than $4bn, according to Forbes. Needless to say, it will have a massive impact on what the NBA will be as a global concern going forward. Fans could continue to bring signs and chants to NBA games in support of Hong Kong protestors and draw attention to the reported mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. Here’s the collapse that ended Dwight Howard’s first crack at winning a championship. “Making money and standing up for human rights should not be mutually exclusive.”. In the end, it’s always about business. Sports Illustrated obtained a copy of the two-page letter. And I do think our future in China is probably pretty remarkable. And in China, discussion of the Hong Kong protests is one of those issues, Tsai said. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Sen. Rubio says NBA, other corporations look the other way on Chinese Communist Party's atrocious actions. Well, for now: the LA Lakers and Brooklyn Nets have completed their preseason sojourns to the nation, and commissioner Adam Silver is back stateside. “Nothing is more important than to grow the game of basketball here in China,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said following the announcement of the NBA Xinjiang center in 2016. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. Reporters could continue to ask questions of NBA players and officials about China and what just happened. Blackburn is giving Silver a July 21 deadline to respond to three questions she poses at the letter’s end regarding China Central Television’s ban on NBA games, the league’s relationship with Chinese state-owned enterprise Alibaba and the league’s training center in the controversial region of Xinjiang. ©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. The NBA's decision to abandon its footprint in Xinjiang, where millions of Muslim Uyghurs have been brutally confined in 'reeducation camps,' is the right way to condemn Chinese oppression and should motivate other American corporations to decry such atrocities. Another Republican senator, Missouri's Josh Hawley, wrote a letter to the NBA earlier this month asking about the league's stance on Hong Kong. ", ACTIVISTS PUSH FOR INVESTIGATION OVER CLAIMS CHINA IS FORCIBLY HARVESTING ORGANS IF UIGHUR POPULATION, Rubio said while the NBA  was seeing dollar signs in China's massive market, the problem is that it's "not just any other market.". “While the NBA has worked hard to raise awareness of social issues at home, there is concern that the league has turned a blind eye to human rights abuses committed abroad—even bowing down to pressure last year,” the letter says. We’ll know based on whether the league goes back to China next spring, and based on whether NBA games this season can be watched by Chinese fans. "The price of that balance of engagement cannot be that we abandon our principles, our ideals, and most importantly, our national interests," Rubio urged.

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