Monday’s edition of the People’s Daily included a letter in the sports section that appeared to have been written by American basketball star Lebron James. Multiple news outlets initially reported that James had authored the piece, but closer examination revealed that a People’s Daily reporter had actually edited and assembled the piece based on comments from group interviews James gave to several journalists while in China. This public relations coup has drawn attention to the rehabilitation of the NBA in China, the growing popularity of basketball in the country, and the ways in which the sport is being used to improve U.S.-China relations, exploit Chinese markets, and shape young male audiences.
According to the letter, “Basketball is not only a sport, but also a bridge that connects us.” It continued, “I also have three children and I know that basketball can inspire generations of people to pursue their dreams. Seeing so many young basketball lovers in China, I hope I can also contribute to the development of Chinese basketball.” This goodwill message resonated on Chinese social media, with one netizen commenting, “While we increasingly don’t see eye to eye with the US in more things, NBA seems to be one of the few things we love in common.”
The letter emerged right after James finished his 2025 China tour with stops in Shanghai and Chengdu, and shortly before the NBA is scheduled to play two preseason games in Macau as part of a new deal that returns it to good standing with Chinese regulators. The league was taken off Chinese broadcasts in 2019 after then-general-manager of the Houston Rockets Daryl Morey expressed support for protesters in Hong Kong. (At the time, James criticized Morey as being “uneducated” about China.) RADII summarized the significance of James’ return to China: “In an era where American sports influence faces increasing competition globally, LeBron‘s return to China and his Forever King Tour with Nike represent something increasingly rare: cultural diplomacy that acknowledges past missteps while building toward a more nuanced future.”
Underpinning James’ longstanding interest in China is also in part its massive market. As Stu Woo reported for The Wall Street Journal last week, James and NBA rival Stephen Curry are competing for lucrative brand recognition in China:
For the first time since the 2019 political showdown that hamstrung the National Basketball Association’s aspirations in China, both of the league’s biggest stars returned to the basketball-crazy nation to plug their shoe brands.
The stakes are huge: a growing Chinese sportswear market worth $60 billion annually, according to data-analytics company Euromonitor International, with footwear alone accounting for $33 billion.
But American companies have been ceding slices of that pie to up-and-coming Chinese rivals.
The return of basketball royalty to China is intended to reverse that trend.
[…] “Shaking hands and meeting people face to face, it’s a strategy that’s worked very well for decades,” said [Mark Dreyer, the Beijing-based author of “Sporting Superpower,” about China’s sports industry], “which is why LeBron and Steph have made so many trips to China over the years.” [Source]
Similarly, the influence of popular Chinese NBA players on the Chinese fanbase can unlock major profits. One example is 20-year-old rising star Yang Hansen, who earned a surprise first-round pick in the NBA draft this summer. Since the draft, retail sales for his team, the Portland Trail Blazers, have increased 1,091 percent compared with 2024, its TikTok account collected over 30 million views, and it gained nearly 900,000 followers on Weibo and Douyin. The Washington Post reported other notable statistics: “On Tencent’s paywalled service, one of Yang’s games drew 3.4 million viewers — 16 times the service’s average. And on China Central Television, Yang’s summer league games garnered larger average audiences than the national broadcast network’s telecasts of this year’s NBA playoffs.”
The Chinese government has noticed this massive interest in basketball and tried to harness its economic potential. Last week, the State Council General Office issued a new document titled “Opinions on Further Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Sports Industry” with the goal of “unlocking the potential of sports consumption.” In a related development, Hong Kong’s legislature passed a bill this week legalizing basketball betting and imposing a 50 percent duty on profits, which could harness the HK$90 billion market and potentially generate up to HK$2 billion in tax revenue. And another site where officials have promoted consumption through basketball is in Zhejiang’s new basketball league, dubbed the “ZheBA,” which has gone viral by tapping into local pride and culture, as June Xia reported last month for the South China Morning Post:
But for its legions of fans, [the ZheBA’s rugged aesthetics, compared to China’s national league, are] all part of its charm. “The ZheBA might not understand basketball, but it understands Zhejiang”, one user wrote on the social platform RedNote, in a post that received thousands of likes.
The ZheBA is part of a broader movement in China towards embracing grass roots amateur sports, after years of growing frustration with the dysfunctional state of the nation’s professional leagues.
[…] Despite being highly local, the ZheBA is also explicitly commercial. The games partly serve as platforms to promote the region’s local produce: teams exchange gifts from their cities before tip-off; the winners are presented with more signature local items, such as live fish or pigs, after the final buzzer.
“Our team may not guarantee a win, but Pinghu watermelons guarantee sweetness”, read one banner at a recent event.
Local authorities often organise live streaming sales events to promote the products spotlighted during the games, and hold night markets, music concerts, and other events near the venues to encourage spectators to splash more cash. [Source]
The ZheBA follows the success of the Village Basketball Association, or CunBA, a grassroots league of amateurs across rural China that has surged in popularity over the past couple years. Joel Wing-Lun wrote in the Made in China Journal last year about this phenomenon and the various actors that benefit from the CunBA: online platforms capitalize on the millions of online spectators; the national government showcases rural revitalization and ethnic harmony; and local businesses and governments profit from record-breaking tourism. Writing about amateur rural basketball in the same journal last month, Selina Kötter and Gil Hizi described how the CunBA also constructs youth identities and idealized forms of masculinity:
[T]his essay examines basketball as a site shaped by the media, viewers, fans, and players. We ask: Why and how does basketball become central to the image of competent youth masculinity, while simultaneously functioning as affective entertainment? How do basketball’s symbols, styles of play, and bodily aesthetics generate role models that reflect youth desires while aligning with hegemonic state ideologies?
[…] We show how basketball imaginaries extend across social spheres, and how official media guides young people in navigating gendered expectations, personal development, and traditional values. We further argue that basketball—understood as an assemblage of practices, objects, and media representations—plays a key role in shaping gendered youth identities in China today, simultaneously fuelling market-driven aspirations and engaging with the disillusionment that increasingly defines young adulthood.
[…] In this essay, we have discussed the centrality of basketball for the formation of an image of idealised masculinity in China today. Different characteristics of masculinity are emphasised across activities and entertainment products involving basketball. Youth drama portrays ideal masculinity through physical attractiveness, fitness, leadership, and the ability to raise female social status, whereas cunBA players and fans highlight moral character, local pride, and a never-give-up mentality. Along with the different depictions across different types of cultural products and events, basketball practices are themselves sites for negotiating different forms of masculine citizenship, incorporating popular desire and fantasies of personal development, on the one hand, and hegemonic official ideologies (‘rural revitalisation’ and pushback against ‘soft masculinity’), on the other. As a popular transnational sport, basketball accommodates both aspects of fandom and play by enthusiasts and is a site for conveying moral prescriptions that extend well beyond sport and leisure, including bodily aesthetics, gender roles, and rural–urban discrepancies. [Source]
