Silencing the crowd: China, the NBA, and leveraging market size to export censorship

Abstract

While censorship within China has been a longstanding phenomenon, efforts to suppress information and to reshape perception of China abroad have become increasingly widespread and sophisticated. Recently, this trend has manifested through several high-profile incidents of foreign firms censoring controversial content outside of China in order to retain access to the Chinese consumer market. This article argues that China is uniquely situated to leverage this type of market power due to its enormous, growing consumer base and authoritarian structure. This form of ‘exporting’ censorship can occur in three ways: content bans, position reversal, and self-censorship. Outward-facing firms, especially in the entertainment industry, are particularly vulnerable to this type of pressure as their employees, including actors, athletes, and celebrity CEOs, may have an independent following and audience for their personal views. By analyzing the controversy between China and the National Basketball Association over a single tweet in support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the conditions under which censorship efforts may be outsourced to private, foreign actors in jurisdictions outside of China.

Keywords:

• China
• censorship
• consumer market
• market power
• economic statecraft
• multinational corporations
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Erik Bainbridge, Dillon Baker, Nabil Bhatia, Louis Pauly, Stefan Renckens, participants at the Fall 2020 University of Toronto Comparative Politics Workshop, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

The author has no conflicts of interest to report.

Notes

1 The tweet has since been deleted.

2 I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

3 Competitive video gaming is extremely popular in East Asia and increasingly popular in Europe and North America. Millions of people watch video game streaming on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Popular Fortnite player Ninja, for example, has over 25 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

4 Indeed, such statements are often combed so thoroughly by company communications officials that all word choices merit scrutiny.

5 The union representing NBA players.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William D. O’Connell

William D. O’Connell is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, specializing in international relations and public policy. His research focuses on global finance and the political economy of multinational corporations.