United States — In an announcement on social media Friday, the Nation Basketball Association (NBA) revealed that it will return to China for two preseason games leading up to the 2025-2026 season. The games — scheduled to take place in China’s gambling city of Macao — will be the NBA’s first in China in more than five years.

In 2019, Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet expressing solidarity with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protestors, who were then facing the prospect of being taken over by the authoritarian central government in Beijing. That takeover is now complete.

When the NBA refused to punish Morey for his tweet, despite Beijing’s insistence that it do so, the Chinese government pulled NBA games from state television and cut business ties, essentially forcing the NBA out of its market.
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This week’s announcement marks a distinct warming of relations between China and the NBA despite the continued degradation of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom in China since 2019. The NBA’s 2019 decision to stand by its principles against Chinese aggression was commendable. The decision this week to join China’s state-sponsored attempts at sportswashing is condemnable.

Sportswashing, or using international sports to distract from human rights abuses, is not unique to China. Indeed, many authoritarian regimes practice sportswashing. From Saudi Arabia’s investment in soccer clubs and racing to Qatar’s much-criticized hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the practice has become commonplace among the world’s dictatorships.

Indeed, China has long been accused of sportswashing, with events like the 2008 and the 2022 Olympic games helping to bolster China’s international image even as it ramped up, or continued, its genocides against Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims and continued to harass and imprison members of China’s many secret Christian house churches.

The Chinese Communist Party’s hostile stance toward religion stretches back to its founding, and it has always persecuted groups attempting to practice their faith outside of the strict confines set by the Chinese government. Authorities regularly harass and shut down unregistered Christian gatherings, arresting leaders and threatening those who wish to practice their faith freely.

During the last several decades, China has been known to have forced abortions on its citizens, sterilized women without their consent, and murdered religious minorities to sell their organs on the black market. Christian home churches are an attempt to escape government scrutiny, but even they are often raided and their members arrested on charges of working against the interests of the state.

China operates a concentrated campaign of persecution against its Muslim-majority Uyghur population. The recent genocide designation comes after detailed research by government and civil society organizations around the world documenting a vast network of concentration camps throughout the Xinjiang region used to oppress and indoctrinate Uyghur prisoners of conscience.

China has even reached beyond its borders to suppress religion and silence opposition. Afghanistan recently discovered a Chinese spy ring operating out of Kabul. The ring worked with the Haqqani network, a Taliban-affiliated terrorist group, to hunt down Uyghurs and bring them back to China. China also recently stepped up its efforts to capture religious minorities through the more traditional route of formal extradition requests.

China has come under harsh condemnation from human rights groups and governments around the world for its repression of political dissent and religious expression in Hong Kong, over which it reestablished control in the summer of 2020.
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