Saying "but muh business" is wrong. Either you think these actions are fine, or you think they are wrong and you can see the clear path where these are leading. Last time we kept on appeasing a dictatorial ethnostate the world took a while to recover.
The US is currently: bombing several countries, putting asylum seekers in high density prisons, blatantly ignoring a global pandemic, assassinating foreign leaders, disproportionately killing and imprisoning black people, using its currency to maintain global hegemony, starting trade wars with pretty much everyone, allies included, spying on the entire world, allies included, emitting a disproportionate amount of carbon, actively rolling back environmental protections, etc etc
The US isn’t that different than China, some might consider US imperialism to be a greater evil. If it is wrong for companies to operate in China, how can you justify them operating in the United States?
EDIT: a lot of people seem to be taking issue with this comment, but I don’t understand the gripe. Presumably the logic is sound that critiques are more interesting if they discuss tradeoffs? Or maybe there is some obvious system that lacks all of the problems of our current system and introduces none of its own? Surely no one is downvoting this because they don’t like our current system but can’t identify a better one...
In the American context at least, most of the time when people point out the failures in Capitalism people mean it more in the way that you might point out edge cases that need to be accounted for. The problem in having these conversations is people take it as some rhetorical device meant to actually promote Communism or some other philosophy.
The point OP is making here, as I understand it, is that there is a paradox in a Capitalist system in that if self-interest and profit are at it's core, then by definition that self-interest will override any other consideration to the point that any company will be more than willing to sacrifice any other concern for the possibility of making money.
We have known for the past 30 years at least that China is on a trajectory to surpass or challenge American supremacy and yet corp after corp was willing to send them technical knowledge and jobs that grew their economy to the point that they can build artificial islands in the South China Sea. Let me remind you that we won WW2 primarily on the strength of being able to outproduce our adversaries, not on technological superiority.
So now though, we're super concerned about Chinese influence in the tech industry, specifically. I am worried too, of course you have to be. But it's tremendously silly to act like now it's suddenly a concern and single out one sector or company (e.g. NBA) as if the sacrifice of values in order to make money is not an inherent characteristic of Capitalism.