[saboot]

I am surprisingly conflicted. My strongest urge is to plainly say, screw them. China is a dictatorship, they are actively stomping out freedoms which I very much believe everyone living person had a right to. If they can't stand hearing the truth, fine, no NBA in China.

In the back of my mind, I also recognize that isolation and division breeds more isolation and division. No NBA in China means less Western and Eastern cultural exchange. China doesn't have that kind of influence in our country, yet our American sport is hugely popular there.

[throwaway1777]

“China doesn’t have that kind of influence in our country”. Yet here we are discussing them.

[saboot]

What does China produce that we have fans for? I don't see many cultural exports from them in America.

[twno1]

Instead wasting time to build culture influence. They simply bought companies from western and become rule maker.

For example, Tencent already bought two popular esport game companies from U.S.(riot game /epic game). Not only for making money, also for ruling esport world.

https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-...

[throwaway1777]

The point is the Chinese market is so large that “American” cultural exports are often tailored to the Chinese.

[beerandt]

Stick with "screw them". The other option plays straight into their The Art of War type strategy.

Which is essentially: keep your enemies close and be their friend and milk them for all they're worth while learning their weaknesses then wait until you grow stronger than them and when they're vulnerable, you pounce.

[mistermann]

> China doesn't have that kind of influence in our country

When China tells American business to jump, they ask how high.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

[Hasknewbie]

All major Hollywood movie studios pro-actively doctor their scripts to make them China-compliant, and you think basketball is somehow going to do better?

On a related note, this thread went from #6 on the front page to #105 (as of right now) in mere minutes. Maybe the mods, who are quite willing to pop in and tell people off whenever someone mentions astroturfing or censorship, would like to explain how a very recent thread with high upvote and comment count can sink so fast all by itself? It's not like users can downvote threads on HN. Threads mentioning China in a bad light tend to de-rank at astronomical speed, for some mysterious reason...

[dirtyid]

There's a flamewar detector that gets triggered usually through chat behavior which leads to thread suppression, i.e. upvote to comment ratio, maybe the level of toxicity in comments according to number of controversial down-voted comments.