Joseph Tsai

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

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 Morey 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.

BEIJING, CHINA - OCTOBER 09: (IMAGE TAKEN WITH MOBILE PHONE CAMERA) A Chinese flag is seen