In a perhaps humorous way to look at a difficult situation, this was all started because of some memes about Pro Basketball. It's sort of snowballed from there,

In a perhaps humorous way to look at a difficult situation, this was all started because of some memes about Pro Basketball. It's sort of snowballed from there, but maybe this is a good cultural touchstone to comment on. American culture permeates a lot of world culture. It dominates pretty much everything. China thought it could import some of it, and then export some of theirs back when the taste of what they'd brought in started to sour. Not so, it seems. Americans like their crass free speech and their memes. ... I'm actually fairly amenable to arguments about national sovereignty and am willing to hear ones about how we (read: the West) need to back off about Hong Kong because, well, we made that deal and China wants to follow through with integrating them into the Mainland. That has been the plan since 1990s. But is this the price I have to pay? Importing Chinese cultural norms to my country? My pro sports stars literally kowtowing to insistence that we "respect" the wishes of an authoritarian Communist government? Fans at games getting kicked out for waving Hong Kong flags? Well fuck that, and fuck anyone who thinks that's just "the cost of doing business". We've let this charade go on long enough. Since the 1990s we've pretended that the more their economy "liberalized" the more they'd become "open" to "democracy". This is a rhetorical ploy, used by elites to mostly just enrich themselves in the process of selling out the rest of us - via IP theft or moving the manufacturing base elsewhere to save some basis points. Free Trade Maximalism is what got us here, and yeah you get cheap goods from China ... but is it really worth it. No really. Is it worth this? Here's what this is really about, and what people who are upset about this are really getting at: we're pretty dissatisfied with how US corporations (and our own government, frankly) have behaved for the last ~30 years or so. It's manifesting with the NBA and video games in China because that pulls in a lot of cash right now and it's run by a lot of characters we don't really like (video games more so than the NBA, if I'm being fair). So, yes, people should be mad at the behavior of Chinese corporations and the Chinese government (but I repeat myself) ... who they should also be mad at is leaders of US corporations who haven't had anything else as a goal but maximizing shareholder returns on a time horizon that matters for no one but themselves.