Hypocritical NBA Complicit In Chinese Human Rights Abuses At NBA Basketball Camps

The NBA is back and the players are wearing idiotic social justice messages that fall on deaf ears for those who know the disgusting relationship between the league and the nation that can only be described as a modern-day Third Reich.
 
While NBA players kneel for the flag, the NBA makes plenty of money off of slave labor in China (making apparel such as the very jerseys the players wear) and other business dealings that ESPN (of all sources) has uncovered in an investigation.
 
Recently, ESPN released a long article reporting on the human rights abuses happening in NBA China “academies”, which are basketball centers meant to help Chinese youth with talent to have a good future and a potential spot on an NBA roster, while also helping said youth to obtain an education for being part of the program.
 
However, reality is far different from the official story the NBA wishes to tell. While the purpose of the camps has been explicitly stated to be: “Find another Yao [Ming]” (according to two former league employees who spoke with ESPN), the NBA basically had to overlook egregious human rights abuses in order to do that (and they didn’t even succeed in finding another Yao Ming).
 
There were three particular human rights abuse problems the NBA had to ignore entirely in order to profit off of one specific NBA “academy” located in Xinjiang:

• First, and perhaps most importantly, the NBA and the people working in the Xinjiang academy (including coaches and trainers) had to ignore Uighurs being mistreated and outright sent to concentration camps (this province is where the reportedly 1 million Uighur Muslims are being held in these camps).

 

• Second, and more directly, the coaches and people employed directly by the NBA had to just accept the fact that local coaches (those employed by the Chinese government) would frequently physically abuse the kids in the academy (around 13 and 14 years of age) and would force them to live in horrible conditions.

 

• Third, as foreigners, the NBA employees were treated harshly, often being detained for no just cause for hours at a time, being constantly surveilled and harassed, to the point where a former league employee compared the atmosphere in Xinjiang to “World War II Germany.”

 
While the NBA recently announced that the Xinjiang facility was closed (and there is reason to doubt that to be true), NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum, who oversees international operations, “declined to say whether human rights were a factor” in the closing down of the facility.
 
Among the reasons given for closing it down were that the NBA had little oversight over what actually happened in those facilities, which would be a likely story, if the facility hadn’t been operating for four years before the league decided to shut it down. What, did their oversight diminish in those four years, or is it just that now, after people have shed some light on the NBA’s dealings with China, that the oversight was deemed insufficient? Either way, I doubt that’s the reason.
 
The NBA employees that were there also decided to report some of the abuses they witnessed to the local NBA offices, but Tatum says that these incidents were “not reported at the time” to the league in New York, including himself or NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
 
One former league coach said he witnessed some of these abuses from Chinese coaches, in one particular instance, with a Chinese coach reportedly firing a ball into a young player’s face and then “kick him in the gut.”
 
I’ll remind you that these kids are around 13 or 14 years of age while the coaches are around 40 – full-grown adults.
 
The former NBA coach is quoted as saying: “Imagine you have a kid who’s 13, 14 years old, and you’ve got a grown coach who is 40 years old hitting your kid. We’re part of that. The NBA is part of that.”
 
In another facility, specifically in Dongguan, Bruce Palmer, then-technical director of the academy – hired by the NBA – said that he repeatedly witnessed Chinese coaches physically abusing the children and repeatedly warned them against it. In one instance, Palmer told a coach: “You can’t do that to your kid, this is an NBA training center. If you really feel like hitting a 14-year-old boy, and you think it’s going to help him or make you feel better, take him off campus, but not here, because the NBA does not allow this.”
 
So, the issue is not that the physical abuse is wrong, but that the NBA “doesn’t allow it”, though they clearly and demonstrably do. THAT is the issue. Not the hitting the kid part, but the hitting the kid in an NBA facility part.
 
I will add another thing about this: the Chinese government workers that abuse these kids will claim that this is “corporal punishment”, but it definitely isn’t.
 
Jinming Zheng is an assistant professor of sports management at Northumbria University in England and he grew up in mainland China, having written plenty about the Chinese sports system. Instead of exposing the human rights abuses of the Chinese government, he opts to excuse them as just being “the old ways” of the older generations.
 
“For most of the older generation, even my grandparents, they take corporal punishment for granted and even see it as an expression of love and care, but I know it might be criticized by people living outside of China. The older generation still sees it as an integral part of training.”
 
What a load of crap. Kicking a kid in the guts is NOT corporal punishment – it’s abuse. Corporal punishment is limited to spankings. Throughout America, specifically where there are riots, I see plenty of people who could have benefited from at least some level of corporal punishment.
 
Throwing the ball at a kid’s face (and the balls are quite heavy and can cause some damage), kicking them in the guts and hitting them in other matters not described in the ESPN report is NOT corporal punishment, so don’t give me that crap.
 
At any rate, moving on, there is the whole issue of the “academies” not being academies at all. Allow me to explain:
 
You see, earlier, I mentioned how the supposed purpose of the academies were to train young Chinese kids to see if they could one day become NBA players while also giving them an education so as to give them a chance at life in China (or elsewhere) if they are not good enough to make it to the NBA. While that is the official story, and might even have been the intention from the NBA, the kids were not actually given any education at all.
 
According to ESPN, the kids would train “two or three times a day and had few extracurricular activities… When the players – some as young as 13 – weren’t training, eating or sleeping, they were often left unsupervised.”
 
“One coach said league officials who visited China seemed to be caught-off guard when they learned that players in the NBA academies did not attend school.”
 
Now, when the NBA employees asked the Chinese officials about whether the kids were attending school, the Chinese officials “reassured” them that they were, which is yet another expected lie from the Chinese – they, in fact, were not attending school, according to multiple reports from league employees.
 
I’ve already shared some of the comments made by NBA employees who were there, but allow me to bring up a couple more: one coach described the NBA facility in China that he worked at as “a sweat camp for athletes,” and considering the other reports about the abuse and poor living conditions, I’d say that’s not only accurate, but widespread in all NBA China facilities.
 
Like I said earlier, one employee compared the situation in Xinjiang to “World War II Germany”, and I’m willing to bet that is fairly accurate for a number of reasons, one of which was the Uighur camps they have in that region, and the other being the authoritarian surveillance by the Chinese government (though that really applies to all of mainland China).
 
Given the little oversight the NBA had over the facilities, one former coach is quoted as saying: “We were basically working for the Chinese government,” seeing as they were the ones who dictated the training regimen and selected the players.
 
One of the worst comments, though, had to have come from Corbin Loubert, who was a strength coach working for the NBA and who went to the Xinjiang facility. What prompted the comment I’m about to share was a story on CNN, which Loubert shared on Twitter, describing the way in which the network’s reporters faced oppressive surveillance and intimidation in the region.
 
Loubert said: “I spent the past year living in Xinjiang, and can confirm every word of this piece is true. One of the biggest challenges was not only the discrimination and harassment I faced, but turning a blind eye to the discrimination and harassment that the Uyghur people around me faced.”
 
I say this is the worst comment because it showed the egregious hypocrisy of the NBA at its worst. In order to profit off of the basketball market in China, the NBA and its employees have to turn a blind eye to blatant discrimination and human rights abuses, all-the-while they will speak about how evil the United States is and all of its past injustices (all of which were perpetrated by Leftists of their era).
 
They will allow players to have jerseys that say “speak up”, or “equality” or “justice” on their jerseys while having those very jerseys manufactured by slaves in China. They will kneel for the flag and anthem as it’s being played while sucking on the profitable teat of the most inhumane regime in the modern era.
 
They encourage people to “stand up” against systems of oppression while forcing their employees to turn a blind eye to that very oppression when in China.
 
Now, I’m not suggesting that the NBA coaches wage a civil war against China while they are there. But as one former employee said: “You can’t have it both ways.” You can’t claim to be a proponent of equal rights for all while sacrificing the lives and rights of a certain group of people just to make a profit. It’s the very type of soulless corporatism they claim to stand against.
 
The NBA cannot claim to support human rights while simultaneously sacrificing those same rights of the people who suffer under Chinese communism.
 
It’s why even Leftists such as AOC have stood against the NBA on this. Granted, she is every bit the hypocrite the NBA is, but that goes to show how utterly unpopular the NBA is on this issue: everyone, Left and Right, will agree, to one extent or another, that the NBA is hypocritical on this issue and is profiting off of human rights abuses in China.
 
Now, sure, the Left might be attacking the NBA on this simply because the NBA is a megacorporation and the Left isn’t exactly fond of corporations, but the point remains.
 
I love basketball, but I loathe the NBA for this. The NBA is the very soulless corporation they claim to stand against.
 
1 Thessalonians 5:22
“Abstain from every form of evil.”