The NBA has ended its relationship with a basketball academy in China’s Xinjiang province, according to a letter sent to U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn.
The letter, which was first reported by Sports Illustrated, was in response to a letter by Blackburn to the NBA that asked a series of questions about the league’s relationship with China. In response to Blackburn’s question about the academy in Xinjiang — where reportedly roughly a million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority, are being held in what have been described as concentration camps — Mark Tatum, the NBA’s deputy commissioner, wrote: “The NBA has had no involvement with the Xinjiang basketball academy for more than a year, and the relationship has been terminated.”
In her own statement in response, Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, said: “China is responsible for some of the greatest human rights violations of our time. The NBA’s decision to abandon its footprint in Xinjiang, where millions of Muslim Uyghurs have been brutally confined in ‘reeducation camps,’ is the right way to condemn Chinese oppression and should motivate other American corporations to decry such atrocities. Making money and standing up for human rights should not be mutually exclusive.”
Blackburn asked two other questions in her letter: about the financial impact of NBA games not airing on Chinese television, and about the league’s relationship with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.
To the question about the cost of the league not having its games shown in China, Tatum said it has been “significant,” estimating the loss of revenue to be “in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The NBA’s games have been off the air in China since October, when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted a graphic that said “Fight For Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong” on Oct. 4. NBA commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this season that losses from games being off the air in China was somewhere less than $400 million.
As for Alibaba — which was co-founded by Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, who remains the company’s executive vice chairman — Tatum said the league has a multiyear deal with the company that primarily focuses on distributing its content — including NBA highlights — in China on Alibaba’s digital platforms. He said there also is an NBA store on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform through which league merchandise is sold to Chinese customers.
Another Republican senator, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, wrote a letter to the NBA earlier this month asking about the league’s stance on Hong Kong.