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Comment by mikelyons | Hacker News Reader

For those who are ignorant, what was the brand's value prop before?

Up to about ten years ago, the Chinese government was generally viewed as becoming more liberal, progressive and open. Under the current regime, the opinion of most western commentators has gone the other way.

11 years ago actually, and that was mainly just for the 2008 Olympics, they quickly retreated after the games. The backpedaling definitely started under Hu even if Xi accelerated it.

But there is hope: another Olympics is happening in 2022, they might restart another charm campaign so that isn’t a disaster.

Shades of 1936.

>>>Up to about ten years ago, the Chinese government was generally viewed as becoming more liberal, progressive and open.

Here's a few articles from what I guess would be contrarian authors then. [1][2] Personally I always thought the idea that China would becoming progressively democratic to be deluded. There are enough examples of well-managed authoritarian capitalism producing good results in Asia for the Chinese to not change course, to say nothing of the inherent greed of the Princelings who directly benefit from their positions of power.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20180918212727/http://www.aei.or...

[2]https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-slow-road-democracy

Money... they want the Chinese to consume NBA content, merchandise and possibly extend the league.

> and possibly extend the league

So much for NBA.

(I mean, I guess it ain't unprecedented, given that there are Canadian teams in the NBA, but at least Canada and the US are close geographically and culturally, while China is neither, last I checked)

As an aside, I recently learned that the N in NHL would have originally been Canada.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hockey_League

In retrospect it makes a lot of sense; but I guess in my subconsciously Americentrist way the thought never occurred to me.

They're probably planning to set up a Chinese NBA league that isn't directly part of the main NBA league. The NFL did that in Europe for while for example. A bunch of teams in Europe competed against each other in their own league for their own cup (The World Bowl), all separate from the 'real' NFL, but all under the NFL banner and with NFL backing.

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