The N.B.A. and others are finding it
difficult to stay neutral in an increasingly politicized, and punitive, China.
By
Amy Qin and Julie Creswell
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Workers
on Tuesday dismantled signage for an N.B.A. fan event that had been
scheduled
for the next night in Shanghai. Credit Associated Press
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BEIJING
— For international
companies looking to do business in China, the rules were once simple. Don’t
talk about the 3 T’s: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
No longer. Fast-changing geopolitical
tensions, growing nationalism and the rise of social media in China have made
it increasingly difficult for multinationals to navigate commerce in the
Communist country. As the National Basketball Association has discovered with a
tweet about the Hong Kong protests, tripwires abound. Take the “wrong” stance
on one of any number of issues — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, for instance
— and you risk upsetting a country of 1.4 billion consumers and losing access
to a hugely profitable market.
Now, multinational companies are increasingly
struggling with one question: how to be apolitical in an increasingly
politicized and punitive China.
“You used to know what would get everyone
fired up,” said James McGregor, chairman of the greater China region for the
consulting firm APCO Worldwide. “And now you don’t know. You just wake up and
discover something new.”
Until recently, the issues that made China
angry were fairly predictable. The German company Leica Camera created a stir
this year with a promotional video featuring the “Tank Man,” the unknown person
who boldly confronted a convoy of tanks during the bloody 1989 crackdown on the
Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. (Leica says it did not commission the
film.)
Around the same time, eagle-eyed Chinese
internet users began calling out companies for not clearly indicating on
websites, customer surveys and products that certain territories claimed by
China, like Tibet and the self-governing island of Taiwan, were part of the
country. Gap, Marriott, United Airlines and others were forced to make internal
adjustments and, in some cases, apologize.
This summer, when antigovernment protests in
Hong Kong began to heat up, such sensitivities reached new heights. And China
lashed out more aggressively, in part because it was playing defense against
growing global support for the demonstrators.
The N.B.A. has been in damage-control mode
over the issue for days. On Friday, Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston
Rockets, posted a message on Twitter that said: “Fight for freedom, stand with
Hong Kong.” Not long after, Mr. Morey’s tweet was deleted and the league
quickly began damage control.
But anger still simmered. Social media
platforms like WeChat and Sina Weibo were flooded with messages declaring a
boycott against the N.B.A., which has a huge fan base in China. On Tuesday
afternoon, CCTV, the state broadcaster, canceled plans to broadcast preseason
N.B.A. games. Previously, Tencent Sports, a popular sports broadcaster, had
announced that it would stop all live streaming and coverage of the Houston
Rockets.
“The N.B.A. has been in cooperation with
China for many years,” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, said at a regular news briefing on Tuesday. “It knows clearly in its
heart what to say and what to do.”
The league has also been getting flak in the
United States for appearing to kowtow to China, prompting a longer, more
reflective statement on Tuesday. While the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver,
continued to express the league’s “affinity” for China, he also said that it
couldn’t regulate its employees’ speech.
For businesses, China’s national ire has
tended to focus on a single issue, despite the changing targets: the country’s
sovereignty.
This summer, Givenchy, Coach and Versace each
apologized to China for producing T-shirts that seemed to identify Hong Kong,
along with other places claimed by Beijing, as an independent country. They all
stopped selling the clothes.
Navigating the potential for backlash in
China’s commercial landscape now involves managing not just products, but
employees and anyone else affiliated with a company.
As the pro-democracy movement took hold in
Hong Kong this summer, Cathay Pacific Airways, the city’s flagship airline,
came under immense pressure from Beijing to discipline employees who were
sympathetic to the protesters. In a matter of days, Cathay’s chief executive
was replaced and several employees, including a pilot, were fired.
On Tuesday, the American video game company
Blizzard suspended a Hong Kong player and rescinded his prize money after he
donned goggles and a respirator — items that have come to symbolize the
protests — and called for the liberation of the city in a post-match interview.
Blizzard is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, which is partly owned by the
Chinese company Tencent.
In a statement on Tuesday, Blizzard said the
player had violated a competition rule barring any act that “brings you into
public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise
damages Blizzard image.”
“While we stand by one’s right to express
individual thoughts and opinions, players and other participants that elect to
participate in our e-sports competitions must abide by the official competition
rules,” the company said.
The political land mines aren’t always easy
to see.
The upscale jeweler Tiffany found itself at
the center of a social media firestorm on Monday after posting an image of a
model covering her eye with her right hand. To many Chinese internet users, the
gesture evoked another symbol of the Hong Kong protests: a woman shot in the
eye with a police beanbag round during a demonstration, whose image later
appeared in countless posters and memes.
The photo posted by Tiffany had been taken in
May, before the protests started. But it was a no-win situation for the
company, which had already warned investors that it would be hurt by the drop
in tourism amid the protests in Hong Kong, its fourth-largest market by sales.
Mainland China is a much larger market, and the company has been rapidly
expanding its presence there.
The photo “was in no way intended to be a
political statement of any kind,” a spokesman for Tiffany said in an emailed
statement, after the offending tweet was deleted. “We regret that it may be
perceived as such, and in turn have removed the image from our digital and
social media channels and will discontinue its use effective immediately.”
The backlash can go both ways.
In an effort not to run afoul of the
mainland, Vans recently removed several entries from its annual sneaker design
contest that alluded to the protests in Hong Kong. After that, several
streetwear stores in Hong Kong pulled all Vans products from their shelves.
“Creativity is one of the keys to solving our
social problems,” said Second Kill, a streetwear store in the Mong Kok
district, in an Instagram post announcing its decision to stop selling Vans
products. “Neither creativity nor public opinion can be erased.”
The N.B.A. on Tuesday appeared to temper its
earlier apology over Mr. Morey’s tweet, seemingly to respond to criticism in
both China and the United States.
For those “who question our motivation, this
is about more than growing our business,” Mr. Silver, the league’s
commissioner, said in a statement. He said basketball could be “an important
form of people-to-people exchange that deepens ties” but noted that the two
countries had different political systems.
“It is inevitable that people around the
world — including from America and China — will have different viewpoints over
different issues. It is not the role of the N.B.A. to adjudicate those issues,”
Mr. Silver said in the statement.
“However,” he added, “the N.B.A. will not put
itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say
or will not say on those issues.”
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.
Claire Fu and Zoe Mou contributed research.
Amy Qin is a China correspondent for The New
York Times in Beijing covering the intersection of culture, politics and
society. @amyyqin
Julie Creswell is a New York-based reporter.
She has covered banks, private equity, retail and health care. She previously
worked for Fortune Magazine and also wrote about debt, monetary policy and
mutual funds at Dow Jones. @julie_creswell
