The tweet heard 'round the C-suite... Heading into the weekend, the Houston Rockets basketball team's GM tweeted support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy protestors resisting political influence from China's Communist Party. Hong Kong is part of China, but a different political system. It's a sensitive subject for Beijing, so China responded hard (and here's mainland China's perspective as told by the Brooklyn Nets' owner).
- Houston Rockets merch was yanked from Alibaba, the huge Chinese ecommerce platform.
- Two NBA pre-season games this week won't be aired on TV in China as planned.
- FYI: The NBA is bummed to make China's naughty list — last year 490M Chinese watched NBA games, and they love the Rockets in particular because of Yao Ming.
American execs have a history of sucking up to China's government... to gain access to its 1.4B potential Starbucks-sipping customers. US CEOs tolerated trade rule-breaking and turned their heads to human rights abuses. Zuck even learned Mandarin to try to get Facebook un-banned in China (he failed).
China effectively censors American business speech... It's famous for its Great Firewall, which tightly controls online information throughout the country (ironically, the Chinese people couldn't be offended by the tweet because Twitter is banned in China). And cameras are everywhere (all 200M of them installed by China's government). But American businesses are increasingly careful to say things critical of China in fear of economic punishment. Even if it's less than 280 characters.