NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
1. Placate the US by putting out a public statement saying "We support freedom of speech for our people."
2. Placate China by using a backchannel to ensure that no one in the NBA actually uses this nominal freedom to say something that hurts China's feelings.
Actually standing up would require supporting a statement that had been said instead of offerring vague support for future statements which may or may not ever occur.
1. a) "Steve Kerr's silence shows NBA-China relationship is league's third rail" - [https://www.nbcsports.com/bayarea/warriors/steve-kerrs-silen...]
b) [https://twitter.com/JamesHasson20/status/1181422479115456512]
3. "Opinion: It's time for LeBron James to speak out on China, regardless of Nike ties" - [https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/josh-peter/2...]
> However, a statement posted in Chinese by the NBA on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging site, appeared different, according to translators.
> “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable," the statement read. "Without a doubt, he has deeply offended many Chinese basketball fans. Morey has clarified that his stance on this issue does not represent either Houston Rockets or the NBA. From NBA’s perspective, people can be interested in different subjects and freely share their opinions. We take respecting Chinese history and culture as a serious matter. We also hope that sports and the NBA, as a unified source of positive energy, can continue to build bridges between countries and bring people together. "
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2019/10/07/nba-chi...
Regardless of whether the NBA has control over what is said on that account, it's pretty shitty to have it one way in one country and another way elsewhere while hiding behind a language barrier. If this kind of double-speak continues, they're playing us all for fools.
> However, a statement posted in Chinese by the NBA on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging site, appeared different, according to translators.
> “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable," the statement read. "Without a doubt, he has deeply offended many Chinese basketball fans. Morey has clarified that his stance on this issue does not represent either Houston Rockets or the NBA. From NBA’s perspective, people can be interested in different subjects and freely share their opinions. We take respecting Chinese history and culture as a serious matter. We also hope that sports and the NBA, as a unified source of positive energy, can continue to build bridges between countries and bring people together. "
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2019/10/07/nba-chi...
One second you are in the market.
Poof, you are not anymore.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
--
Investing in China as a western company to earn money is the worst business decision you can have.
Knowledge transfer for manufacturing is the second.
That was nothing but PR doubletalk.
I read an article very recently (NY Times, maybe?) that laid out the numbers, and the amount of money the NBA earns in China dwarfs its U.S. revenue.
not like China is going to come up with their own basketball league
It already has basketball leagues. And considering that China has exported star players to the NBA, it's certainly a possibility.
Those numbers are outdated and incomplete, but basically describe the relative market size.
Maybe you are thinking of rate of growth.
EDIT: As tanilama pointed out my numbers are wrong. The USA (ESPN & TNT) TV deal is about ~$2.6B per year. The Tencent streaming deal is ~$1.5B over 5 years. I don't know about CCTV.
https://www.cbc.ca/sports/basketball/nba/nba-tv-deal-how-the...
Annually it says the revenue is 2.6B. Not sure how much revenue they are making from China on a yearly basis (Tencent's contract is 5 years).
pretty sure that basically describes the relative market valuation - given income differences/relative cache of the two different leagues, market size vs valuation would be vastly different.
Source?
>It already has basketball leagues.
I guess it's a good thing I didn't say they don't. Partial quoting to try to make a point where there isn't one isn't very cool.
>And considering that China has exported star players to the NBA, it's certainly a possibility.
It's exported exactly one star: yao Ming, and one slightly above average player in Jeremy Lin. And those two were so far apart they never played in the NBA at the same time. If you think one star every 30 years is going to be good enough to replace an NBA that produces multiple stars every other year.... I guess pass whatever you're smoking my way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Lin
Jeremy Lin is of Chinese descent. I didn't say he was born there.
What if Daryl Morey had tweeted that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman?
There's no doubt he would have been fired and deplatformed faster than greased lightning...
Social media is making it hard for individuals to keep their personal thoughts separate from their work.
Not sure what the answer is. Everybody chill?
You wouldn't see countries threatening to ban the entire NBA.
> There's no doubt he would have been fired and deplatformed faster than greased lightning...
Sign me up for a lot of doubt!
I don’t understand this. They could lost all their market in China which is not a small number and in return, long-term financially, nothing. It is not like Chinese people can’t live without it. There are more than enough entertainments for Chinese people to enjoy.
That said, the reason additional profits matter is that 51% of the revenue (not profits) go to the players, and the salary cap is tied directly to total revenue. This was collectively bargained and cannot be changed without a renegotiation. A lot of decisions have been made making assumptions about revenue that include revenue from China. On the player side, the total amount of money available to them is directly impacted by how much money is generated in China.
All that said, the NBA and the players should absolutely speak out and dare the CCP to delete the NBA. It's the most popular sport in the country and they've spent years cultivating the relationship. People will notice if it disappears.
On the other hand, if the NBA doesn't stand up to China, a large part of their core audience will find something else to do.
That question should be addressed to the Chinese government, they are the one wanting to block the league.
Why not? Is it inconceivable that in the future the CBA will be able to compete with the NBA for top talent? I guarantee that down the road a future Zion Williamson will choose to play in China over New Orleans. This won't be in the near future mind you, but as the Chinese economy grows, and as basketball gets more popular, I don't see why this couldn't be the future.
Also, there are a great many cultural and economic reasons that foreign players generally avoid playing in China's existing professional sports league. Political oppression is just one of those reasons.
"We support free speech" is a cop-out, because China is happy for you to support free speech, as long as you don't say anything they don't like. It would be a stronger stance to say, "Actually, we think Morey was right", especially if it's going to cost them money to do so.
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1181497808563658752
Really I don't know what more you're expecting. This is a strong stance.
Even if they did, so what? There's certainly room in the world for quite a few basketball leagues.
I mean, after all, Hong Kong was occupied by the British for over 100 years. And it played a huge role in the opium trade. So I can imagine how it could be a substantial third-rail issue.
That all said it'd be awesome if they chose to push back even though it's entirely destructive to themselves.
Lastly, there are no American corporations, nothing should be given to them because they're assumed to be American and nothing should be expected of them - anything required of them should be encoded into law so that one corporation can't exploit the morally correct decision of another corporation as a weakness.
We had the Blizzard/War of Omens thing [1], and the Houston Rockets remark being rescinded [2], and the South Park cancellation [3], and now this, all in the span of about a week.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/blizzard-removes-blitzchung-from-h...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/houston-rockets-gm-morey-del...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dek3kl/south_par...
https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/
That one wasn't even anything apparently political, just absurd snowflake-scale sensitivity on the part of a whole country:
Donovan made the “Chinese pig” comment on Wednesday as he attempted to explain why the country’s swine flu outbreak shouldn’t concern investors eyeing the international inflation outlook.
“Does this matter? It matters if you are a Chinese pig,” Donovan said. “It matters if you like eating pork in China. It does not really matter to the rest of the world. China does not export a lot of food. The only global relevance would be if Chinese inflation influenced politics and other policies.”
Somehow the second sentence got interpreted as an insult - or was it just part of a trend of throwing weight around, as you suggest?
One of China’s biggest state-owned infrastructure companies excluded UBS Group AG from a bond deal after the bank’s global chief economist sparked a furor with his use of the phrase “Chinese pig.”
The comment was condemned by two Communist Party publications and by trade groups representing Chinese brokerages. Haitong International Securities Group, which competes against UBS for China-related business, said on Friday that it had suspended its activities with the bank.
Honestly, having watched this sort of stuff for years my own business interest in China is dead. Yes, it's a big market. But you can live very comfortably serving the rest of the world. Facebook and Google are banned there, they still mint more money than they can spend. Ignoring that market completely seems like a recipe for a much simpler life.
There's just no sensible explanation for why anyone would get upset by that statement.
what about sourcing manufacturing?
this is the crux.
Instead, we've played ourselves for absolute suckers, and as China's economy and military muscle continues to rapidly expand and the rest of the world is increasingly dependent on its products and markets, they're beginning to throw their weight around. All the pearl-clutching over Trump's tariffs and attempt at a renewed industrial policy (however poorly executed) elided the question of what exactly anyone else was proposing to do, with the default being the continuation of business-as-usual.
People need to wake up and realize China is a far greater geopolitical threat than the USSR ever was. They have a massive population and they've melded together free-ish market strategic industrial capitalism with a totalitarian panopticon state unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their military is rapidly catching up with if not in some areas surpassing our own, and we're sitting on our asses arguing over idiotic domestic squabbles assuming the unipolar post-cold war world will continue on forever. Because Muricuh!
Frankly, thank god this is finally bleeding out into popular culture, because maybe average citizens will start to realize what a straight-line projection of our current situation is going to look like in a decade or two.
Well the soda maker didn't agree, so they pulled the inventory out.
Weeks later the retailer came back to invite them in at the same rates. Apparently the customers weren't happy that their favorite soda wasn't available, and made sure to let the staff know.
If China starts to pull the plug on unique products and services, I believe there's going to be a ripple effect. I'm pretty sure there are millions of people in China that still enjoy the NBA, despite NBA's stance on what ever the subject is.
This will add up. Maybe the fear of instability through Western propaganda should be matched by the instability that the actualization of censorship is alive and well, via the ban of content people like.
Maybe not.
However, if the government chooses to grease the wheels of fury or even light the flame via astroturfing while simultaneously censoring dissenting opinions, they look mighty unified.
Remember, this tweet was on _Twitter_. Twitter is banned in China, which raises the question of how this became such a mainstream issue there organically. Sure, I suppose it’s possible that an expat reshared it on Weibo and the entire country went bananas but that seems a like a bit of a stretch to me.
https://twitter.com/rhokilpatrick/status/1181591094473052160
Also hello to the MSS sockpuppet accounts joining the debate.
This guy is a regular every day Canadian with a Chinese wife who's lived there on and off for 13 or so years, and he has a very unbiased opinion.
This episode is about Chinese Patriotism, very thought provoking.
The reality is though, no singular opinion is "correct", best to consume a wide variety of opinions with an open mind, and resist forming any strong conclusions about particulars. Usually, the correct answer is "well, it depends".
Both companiese "seem" to be doing fine AFAICT. Most people I've asked seem not to care. I'd love it if they did care since the store branded products are not as good IMO.
You either engage with China and turn a blind eye to their internal repression or totally decouple yourself from them ... can't have your cake and eat it.
Except with China it's 1000x worse. It's not an app, it's not just an extra feature, it's the wholesale export of their authoritarian society to the rest of the world. When the statements of a user of your system (as with Hearthstone) risks your company being banned in China, self-censorship inevitably ensues. How long will it be until China insists that anyone, anywhere be deplatformed for this sort of thing?
The message is that the US have a lot to lose if China starts to also effectively blacklist American companies like the US try to do to Chinese companies...
Edit: Someone should explain why now on HN a comment like this one that simply tries to look beyond the obvious and to discuss current issues with a bit more depth is received so negatively as soon as posted.
Now we have China which is basketball-mad but the problem is we can't use the carrot of the NBA to entice them towards us as long as the NBA is willing to trade their product under China's terms for a big enough paycheque. The NBA's attempt to paint themselves as a non-participant is totally unacceptable. You either stand for something or you stand for nothing; you don't get to quietly profit from the situation while declaring you have no position. That's the "good people on both sides" argument we rightly called out as total BS.
The concept of "enticing China towards the US" is also naive at best. China is not a small country that the US can turn into a satellite. It is a superpower with its own views and interests and however its political regime will evolve it will not be either aligned with or under the leadership of the US. The US government knows that and that is the problem they have with China.
Culturally, China is not an exporter. It imports culture massively, but it isn't IP it can easily copy.
Authoritarian regimes are usually pretty bad at creating cultural products, except the ones like gruesome museums. Though I'm looking forward to HK producing its own Ai Weiwei or Guo Jian.
Glasnost, Perestroika, Afghanistan, economic stagnation, and the growing squeamishness of the country's leadership to use mass violence for political repression did.
If the economy of the USSR were growing 7% year over year, the Berlin wall would be six hundred feet tall by now, and communists would still be in charge of half of Europe.
Change in superpowers comes from within, not from foreign grandstanding.
I am purposefully, and quite absurdly, conflating Khrushchev's rather embarrassing shoe debacle with the rather embarrassing overstatement of Reagan's oratorical prowess and influence, in the affair of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many people hold to the mistaken belief that he can take any credit for it. [1]
[1] Occasionally, they trot out 'Star Wars bankrupts the Soviet Union' as his greatest triumph. No, it wasn't eight years of Star Wars that starved the Soviet Economy, it was eight decades of military spending taking up >40% of GDP.
Just take the article when China was first to ban the Boeing 737. Everyone here yell at bad china like in a tabloid forum...
How many Chinese will pay attention to "whatever those people are doing in Hong Kong" for the first time because of this ?
Which is to say, what if lots of young Chinese stand up and take notice that they can't watch world class professional basketball anymore ?
I am well aware that there is homegrown professional basketball in China, but the $4B number suggests they want to watch the NBA, which isn't surprising.
It's not obvious to me that, from the position of youth in China, the state holds the winning hand here ...
Don’t count on young people to take the west’s side on anything. They enjoy our media and the products our mega corporations make, but they don’t need them and they’ll switch to Chinese alternatives instantly.
Many Westerners have trouble coming to terms with things like "Not all the Chinese hate the CCP", or "Russians are just regular people like you and me."
Most of them are already aware, and due to state ran media and an ultra-nationalistic view, are in full support of CCP and are very much against HK and their protests.
Here is a video from a guy who lived in China for over a decade, is married to a mainland Chinese woman, has family both in Hong Kong as well as Mainland, and how it's destroying his family due to the Mainlander's views of Hong Kong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4wbx9hIN4E
Which is blatantly false. I know it's a tired meme, but there's an Orwellian panopticon powered by computers which literally rates each and every person by their level of socially desirable metrics and materially affects their daily life. That is oppression of freedom, and it's only the beginning. We've been down this road before with other autocracies in the past, but they weren't powered by machine learning...
That being said the video did give an important perspective of the overwhelming level of patriotism the Chinese people have for their country.
If they've been living under a rock where they didn't notice the defacement of the national emblem at the Liaison Office when it was widely condemned in the state media, they're not going to notice the NBA getting cancelled.
You can't expect them to miraculously find a source that doesn't condemn this as an attack on the national sovereignty of China by American imperialists.
It is arguably the Young that start this online campaign to call NBA out. The government/brands follow the suits.
The tension is high. I think watching NBA is soon to be deemed as unpatriotic by social media, and that will be one of the long-lasting legacy of this event.
Butterfly effect.
"It is inevitable that people around the world -- including America and China -- will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences.”
Bullshit, see North Carolina.
“However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way."
Bullshit, see Donald Sterling.
Daryl Morey is not an employee of the NBA, so I don't think there's anything they could do, practically speaking.
And now, everyone with a whit of sense knows that China will not bow to pressure, and the NBA has more to lose from taking a stance.
For some reason, they aren't keen on tilting at windmills.
> Whether the topic is Colin Kaepernick, mass shootings or President Donald Trump, the Golden State Warriors coach is rarely shy about speaking out on difficult, controversial subjects. Except on Monday. Kerr was asked about the controversy engulfing the NBA ... He didn’t have much to say.
https://sports.yahoo.com/outspoken-warriors-coach-steve-kerr...
> But what’s not complicated is analyzing the NBA’s response to Morey’s comments, which places a clear priority on the league’s financial interests over human rights concerns on the other side of the world.
One topic to bring up is how the NBA is targeting India as it's next country to try to bring basketball to [0]. What should happen to comments people might have about the India-Pakistan boarder conflict? Would the people here commenting about how rich people shouldn't be targeting China for money and growth complain about the NBA looking to grow in other markets? They've grown incredibly large in Europe over the past couple decades. Yes for money, but also popularity is fun to have, and amazing stories of players from those places.
I suppose my current stance on this, and a stance after only a few days and reading comments and posts from so many people which might change later or after responses to my comment here, is that the NBA should wave its hands and say the other countries can do what they want in terms of not even admitting the Rockets exist, or hide games completely, but reiterate that the players, GMs, and even owners, can say what they want, and that the NBA can and should continue to push the NBA to other markets.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/asia/nba-india-intl-hnk-scli/...)
How about the US government? I know in another post I made the point that we could not just call out Blizzard or other game companies but instead have to call out ALL companies that do business in China and worse crack down on their own and related who dare say something China does not approve of.
However the real party that has to be taken to task is our own governments. In the US that means both Congress and the Administration. That means all candidates for President need to state their stance NOW.
How it plays out in the EU I have no idea, news of any of their businesses or governments bending to China's will are pretty much absent from US news
edit:recently we have had major issues with privacy concerns, losing freedom of speech is a form of that as well.
EU governments and companies bend over for China way easier than in the US as there's a huge lack on unity in the EU where it's every country for itself like when China protested on Norway's leaders not meeting the Dalai Lama and Norway complied.[1]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/world/europe/norways-lead...
* Vilnius takes down ads after China promotes unsanctioned commemoration – 'it's a geopolitical provocation' [1]
* Lithuania hands note to China over incident during Hong Kong support rally in Vilnius [2]
[1] https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/news-in-english/19/1100141/viln...
[2] https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/news-in-english/19/1093636/lith...
Edit: Included titles
Sadly, I think there's not enough public will to punish entities like the NBA or Blizzard for their servile behavior.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/04/trump-china-ho...
Clearly our chief executive is happy to silence efforts. All for support re-electing him.
Why China would agree I don't know (the Falun Gong who hates the current Chinese government was, a few months ago the top-dollar supporter of the Trump campaign, not to mention the trade war).
Ok, so maybe Trump is remaining silent on the Hong Kong protests, but let's not pretend that he hasn't put the screws to China or talked often about their corrupt mercantile practices. Trump has been an anti-China force.
You know something is allowed in China if it traces all its authority back to exist back to the party. That's how communism has always operated. The success of the party was the highest goal of highest goals that lead to all the purges and terrors throughout history.
I would love for the NBA to stand up to China on this issue, but it IS NOT AN EASY OR OBVIOUS DECISION.
Remember when Google, promised it wouldn't kowtow to China? Then kowtowed anyway.
A better example would be how Apple quietly shared iCloud user data with the Chinese government.
You either stand against tyranny, or support it.
There is no middle ground, and this needs to be made clear to every company that is faced with this decision.
Episode "Dead Kids" for example (about school shootings) is amazing, and its ending is absolutely brutal. I know it will stay with me for years.
In fact, the more I think about this, is this even a problem?
I've been on Weibo a bit looking at reactions to all this, and here's the thing, if your average mainlander is upset and no longer wants to have anything to do with you, which, judging from the volume of comments seems to be true, why is that necessarily a problem?
People can say whatever they want. And other people can associate with whoever they want. Again, the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as simple Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association in action.
Fine. Just don't watch NBA anymore. You have the CBA anyway. No worries and no hard feelings. You do your thing in China and we'll do ours in the US.
You cannot flout the laws in China and continue to do business in China. This should also be reciprocal: Chinese companies should not be able to do business in the United States while flouting the laws of the United States.
US companies should stop targeting China for growth. If they don't steal your IP completely, they'll eventually freeze you out like they just did the NBA. It's happened to many companies and will eventually happen to you too. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I don't understand how American businesses didn't learn their lesson in Cuba in the 60's?
Most NBA team owners are already billionaires. I believe most of them are self-made and have signed the giving pledge, meaning they will donate much of their wealth to charities at or before their death. If anyone can afford to take a stand, it would seem to be them.
The jersey sponsor of the LA Lakers is Wish.com, a company doing drop shipping from China.
LeBron James is sponsored by Nike (as are all of the jerseys) and Nike has significant interest in keeping the Chinese market open. LeBron is leading production of Space Jam 2. He won’t jeopardize international acclaim and box office revenue for this.
This is the same for every other player. Sponsorship deals with apparel companies are a huge source of income. Few stars are untouchable and the ones who are wont risk other business interests.
hell, the rockets ownership allegedly discussed removing "one of the best GMs in the league": https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/10/6/20901828/daryl-morey...
and give me a break about the giving pledge. when people are dead, access to their money doesn't matter. if they want to earn some sort of altruistic "cred", they can donate 90% of their net worth, today, and still be in the 100 millionaire club.
go ahead and let me know when any one of these people does that.
This is the same guy who has two former employees, one is a newer Supreme Court Justice that he allegedly spent $10 million in dark money helping and the other is a US Senator whose running for President. He also happens to own Coachella despite fighting legal weed and donating to anti-gay groups in the past.
Why do you believe this? As far as I can tell Dan Gilbert is the only one I see on that list.
Not saying that NBA and basket generally speaking is not important anymore for Europeans, because it is, but there was a slight moment during the timeframe I mentioned when the likes of Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Larry Bird, Sabonis or Toni Kukoc were more famous than many footballers of that time. But in the second part of the '90s something happened and apart from a few exceptions (like LeBron or Kobe) no big NBA names from across the Atlantic have been widely known in here. Which is to say that it's totally possible for the NBA to lose the Chinese market.
This ignores human nature and basic incentives. Of course it's not much of a dilemma for you and me. We aren't the ones who stand to gain or lose hundreds millions of dollars. It shouldn't be shocking that many people with skin in the game feel differently.
And I don't think it has much to do with being rich. I suspect plenty of thousandairs would happily kowtow to fascists for a few weeks in return for a six-figure payday.
I liked Silver's response. Respectfully but firmly refusing to get into regulating the politics of however many players and employees.
fascist != authoritarian, it also about long term business opportunities. Selling NBA product for decades to come is hardly quick buck.
You are mostly right on the rest though - for the spherical cow in vacuum type of corporation that can ignore 1/6 of the world's population.
China is big player. Ascending superpowers tend to like flexing muscles and rocking the boat.
Tim Cook was Apple's strongman who basically blackmailed Apple's entire Chinese supply chain to meet insane shipping and quality standards. Amazon has done it with their local delivery contracts with third party vendors. Forcing them to meet unrealistic delivery goals all the while detaching themselves from any responsibility for what happens when their vendors push themselves too much and people start dying.
I do agree wholeheartedly about how any company, in the US or abroad should stop targeting China for their growth.
I don't recall Apple demanding that their Chinese suppliers stay silent about Apple concentration camps or otherwise risk losing the business.
Under Deng Xiaoping, China gradually undid the economic structures that define communism and moved to a market-driven economy. Today it is essentially a free market economy with maybe a little more government intervention than most other free market economies. China is communist in name only.
"Fascists" is probably not a good description of the Chinese Communist Party, since Fascism is widely regarded as always and everywhere the diametric opposite/enemy of Communism and Communists. Examples of this include [0] and [1] and [2] and [3], which are the results of me googling "is fascism the enemy of communism?" for 5 seconds. Probably you mean "Totalitarians" or "Statists" or "Authoritarian Governments" or something like that.
This is pedantic but lots of the discussion downthread seems to hinge on this point of equating "Chinese Communists" with "Fascists," and that's imho a totally false premise.
Oftentimes people say things like "Well the Chinese are commies in name only" and similar, and this might be semi-or-mostly true, but it's a bit of a leap from there to calling them fascists.
[0] "Mussolini, with his anti-Communist doctrines..." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini
[1] "In Hitler's mind, communism was a major enemy of Germany ... Hitler claimed that his singular goal was to assist the German government in "fighting Marxism". Marxism, Bolshevism, and communism were interchangeable terms for Hitler..." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Adolf_Hitle...
[2] "Fascism is often considered to be a reaction to communist and socialist uprisings..." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-communism
[3] "...in the early 1920s the Nazis were only one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement" also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-communism
By who? Is there a reason for this?
Fascism's self-description is basically just the motto "united we stand, divided we fall". It's right there in the name. As a philosophy, I know it best for strict intolerance of public dissent. That sort of thing undermines unity.
And that's pretty much it. I would have said that "fascism" in modern American usage had lost all meaning other than as a generic term of abuse; I would never have guessed that it was supposed to mean "the opposite of communism, whatever that might mean". "The opposite of communism" is usually considered to be capitalism.
But there seem to be many good correspondences between Chinese practice today and original, Mussolini-style fascism.
The two seem to always be found near each other.
Sun Tzu said that the supreme excellence consists of defeating your enemy without fighting.
Guess what, we are ruled from Beijing now.
Yes, a company has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but there are lots of ways to fulfill that duty. There's no requirement that they expand into China. Many companies don't and it's fine
Then be laughed out of court right after filing for having no legal basis.
So, I think this proves that nothing changes. I'd be supprised that any TV-channel could show a Winnie the Pooh figure ever again.
It's like one big kindergarden, but for >1 billion people.
I wonder what "free" does mean to them, then.
War is an appropriate conflict resolution approach for ant colonies, but not for people. I hope people here realize that.
comes back empty
------ ------
The 1st amendment only protects you from the US government, not the Chinese government
this seems like a good example of why we need to rethink "...but not the consequences of that speech!"
https://nbaacademy.nba.com/location/xinjiang/
Meanwhile, millions of Uyghurs are being imprisoned nearby in concentration camps.
I mean, I guess I should ask, in your view, where would that stop? Boycott every nation in the world with human rights violations?
That's the rub.
That's the same thing as saying you don't necessarily mind doing business with human rights abusers, as long as you don't feel too strongly about the people being abused.
What is happening to the NBA, Blizzard, and seemingly every company that has a presence in China is the tip of the iceberg.
If we as a liberal free society cannot stand against the rise of oppressive totalitarianism then we are doomed to fail.
Incremental profits and potential market share in a closed economy is not worth the values we are sacrificing in the process.
If you are a C-level executive at a company doing business in China these issues need to addressed at the board level. What is the level of influence that the Chinese government is exerting on you and your morals.
Your stance should be clear: You either support the people of HK and their fight for representation in government, or you support the totalitarian regime that is oppressing them and hundreds of millions of other Chinese citizens.
Your presidential candidate need to fix human rights issues in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Democracy installed by the US government gotta have a warranty and customer service.
If the outcome of US installed human rights means tens of thousands of refugees and jihad fighters how can your model of human rights even work in a 1.4B population China?
How many revolutions and dictatorships did the French have to go through until they settled on a system that works for them?
I'm not sure that user is pushing a particular agenda you describe. Nor does the name of a book prove much of anything.
The global nature of today's economy, the complexity of navigating commerce and industry, and the sheer magnitude of output required to be profitable, makes it hard to do anything all by yourself. If we consider each person their own island with cash in- and outflow, then everyone is self-made. If we consider the global network of money changing hands, no one is self-made.
And I have always understood the word to be used in that sense.
See the Collins definition (emphasis mine):
Self-made is used to describe people who have become successful and rich through their own efforts, especially if they started life without money, education, or high social status.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/self-ma...
HN Argumentum_ad_dictionarium at its finest. It's getting tiring.
If I was capable of issuing every possible order to every employee, am I more entitled to the profits derived from their output if they happen to do something I mentioned?
The major difference between inheriting money and attracting investors is that you need to be more convincing for the latter to get the money on offer. The investor to whom you are otherwise a stranger might want to put some contract together to make sure they see a slice of the pie if you're successful (big if!), but if you fail they don't demand their money back.
But how can you call it "self-made" if you're using someone else's money? It doesn't matter which pocket it comes from, at some point very early in the process you are dependent on the pocketbooks of others.
Didn't realize it was that easy. Why doesn't everyone just do this one little trick?
This rhetoric is not uncommon in business.
You have spent/are spending money so that eventually it comes back as more money. What else is "investment"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21194189 and marked it off-topic.
Not so much a "deep bow" as "prostration on the ground".
> Appropriately enough
Ironically enough, you're misusing this phrase.
> This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
-- Douglas Adams
The NBA has a choice between human rights and money. Of course they chose money. US culture has been designed around money and greed so long it has forgotten principals it was supposedly founded on. Sure we fought a civil war over human rights vs greed, but that was a long time ago. After right-wing interests outsourced all the production and jobs for money in the past few decades, Steve Jobs was right: Those jobs aren't coming back.
free speech, but don't build it another people's feelings, think about the Clipper's, if NBA don't do it, someone will do it. There's more on basketball than NBA.
Oh except for that punching innocent people thing, which is bad. I like how you snuck that one in there.