{"id":224909,"date":"2025-10-14T21:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T21:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/224909\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T21:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T21:11:08","slug":"nba-returns-to-china-with-preseason-games-amid-rising-u-s-tensions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/224909\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA Returns to China With Preseason Games Amid Rising U.S. Tensions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Basketball Association (NBA) returned to China after a six-year hiatus this weekend, staging two preseason games between the Phoenix Suns and the Brooklyn Nets in Macau\u2014the semi-autonomous territory in the country\u2019s south that is best known for its casinos. It was in one of those casinos\u2014the Venetian<\/a>, owned by U.S. billionaire Miriam Adelson\u2014that the Suns and Nets played in front of a of thousands of Chinese fans.<\/p>\n

That fandom was built over much of the past two decades, a love affair that began in 2002<\/a> when the Houston Rockets drafted 7-foot-6-inch Chinese player Yao Ming. Yao went on to have a stellar career (eight-time All-Star, Hall of Famer) during which hundreds of millions of people in China became NBA fans.<\/p>\n

The National Basketball Association (NBA) returned to China after a six-year hiatus this weekend, staging two preseason games between the Phoenix Suns and the Brooklyn Nets in Macau\u2014the semi-autonomous territory in the country\u2019s south that is best known for its casinos. It was in one of those casinos\u2014the Venetian<\/a>, owned by U.S. billionaire Miriam Adelson\u2014that the Suns and Nets played in front of a of thousands of Chinese fans.<\/p>\n

That fandom was built over much of the past two decades, a love affair that began in 2002<\/a> when the Houston Rockets drafted 7-foot-6-inch Chinese player Yao Ming. Yao went on to have a stellar career (eight-time All-Star, Hall of Famer) during which hundreds of millions of people in China became NBA fans.<\/p>\n

The league cashed in aggressively, hosting more than two dozen<\/a> preseason games in China between 2004 and 2019\u2014not to mention the frequent visits and basketball camps by superstars such as Kobe Bryant<\/a> and LeBron James<\/a>. A 2022 analysis<\/a> by ESPN valued the NBA\u2019s China business at around $5 billion.<\/p>\n

It was days before James\u2019s last preseason tour of China with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2019 that it all fell apart. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Rockets at the time, tweeted a message<\/a> of solidarity with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong<\/a>, another semi-autonomous territory\u2014just a short ferry ride away from Macau\u2014that China has increasingly tightened its grip on.<\/p>\n

Morey\u2019s tweet, which read \u201cFight For Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,\u201d was quickly deleted, but the damage was done. Chinese broadcasters stopped showing NBA games, local sponsorship deals collapsed, and James\u2019s preseason games in China the following week (also against the Nets) would end up being the NBA\u2019s last\u2014until now.<\/p>\n

The NBA-China dustup coincided with a particularly fraught period in China\u2019s relationship with the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s aggressive trade war<\/a> and tech curbs<\/a> against China were the cornerstone of his first term in office, which ended a little more than a year after the NBA controversy. His hawkish stance against Beijing was largely continued by former President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025.<\/p>\n

Since Trump\u2019s return to the White House in January this year, his China policy has been more mercurial, marked by sudden escalations that have been mostly walked back<\/a>. In the meantime, China has weaponized its leverage<\/a>, and Trump appears eager<\/a> to cut a deal.<\/p>\n

China has also shown a willingness to leverage its soft power<\/a> tools, such as its status as the world\u2019s purveyor of popular and cuddly pandas<\/a> and its ownership of the hugely popular social media app TikTok<\/a>, to put U.S. leaders in awkward positions.<\/p>\n

But soft power keeps reasserting itself. The pandas<\/a>, which China withdrew from Washington\u2019s Smithsonian National Zoo in 2023 were replaced with new ones a year later. And TikTok<\/a> has been at least temporarily saved from going dark in the United States. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, meantime, quietly resumed<\/a> showing NBA games a little more than three years ago\u2014even as Washington and Beijing escalated their diplomatic, military, and technological great power competition.<\/p>\n

The choice of Macau as a venue for the weekend\u2019s preseason games (only its second time hosting them since 2004) stems in part from capitalistic realism. Casino executive Patrick Dumont, whose billionaire mother-in-law\u2014the aforementioned Adelson\u2014also happens to be one of Trump\u2019s biggest donors, reportedly<\/a> lobbied to stage the games there.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also a degree of symbolism involved. Macau represents a similar China-but-not-quite-China status as Hong Kong, which precipitated the whole NBA firestorm six years ago. Both territories are ruled under a principle called \u201cone country, two systems,\u201d which allows them a degree of autonomy despite Chinese control.<\/p>\n

Macau\u2019s hosting of the preseason games\u2014part of a five-year deal<\/a> with Adelson\u2019s company Las Vegas Sands\u2014also allows the NBA to dip its toe back into the Chinese market, where at its peak, the league was watched by some 500 million people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether that opens the door to bring games back to mainland Chinese metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, as was common in the preceding decades. But for now, at least basketball is back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The National Basketball Association (NBA) returned to China after a six-year hiatus this weekend, staging two preseason games…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[144,45265,63159,5425,355,99,21],"class_list":{"0":"post-224909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-foreign-public-diplomacy","10":"tag-homepage_regional_china","11":"tag-hong-kong","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}