NBA partners with Chinese company Ant Group to work together

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NBA partners with Chinese company Ant Group to work together

The NBA and Chinese company Ant Group have entered a strategic partnership in China to work on different projects like video content, broadcasting and membership, according to Ant Group.

Chinese fans would be able to access NBA video content on Alipay, a payment app owned by Ant Group, the company said in a statement.

According to the statement, the relationship between the NBA and Ant Group will also include joint marketing campaigns, digital collectibles and other areas.

Last week, NBA China launched a channel in AliPay that showcases user-generated content from NBA China's network of influencers and Alipay's authorized content creators.

The NBA is a popular cultural export to China and the presence of the basketball league in the Chinese market brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In recent years, the NBA's longtime partnership with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV has been strained after former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey expressed his support for anti-government protestors in Chinese-ruled Hong Kong in 2019.

Morey, now general manager of the Philadelphia 76 ers, shared an image on Twitter in October 2019 that reads Fight for Freedom. He later deleted the tweet and said he did not mean to offend Rockets fans or the people of China.

China condemned Morey's tweet, and NBA games were pulled from CCTV shortly after.

The NBA initially said Morey's tweet was regrettable and that he had deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China. The league said it remains committed to free speech, and that it remains committed to free speech.

Free agent Enes Kanter Freedom, an outspoken critic of China's human rights abuses, has repeatedly called out Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James and other athletes for doing business with China.

In 2021, Chinese video-streaming site Tencent pulled a Boston Celtics game after Freedom, who played for the team at the time, wore shoes criticizing China's treatment of Tibet.

Despite criticisms of China from some NBA personnel, the league's games returned to Chinese televisions last March. In June, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of the 18 month blackout, but affirmed the NBA's commitment to free speech.

Silver said at the time that if we lose money or we get taken off the air, we accept that.

The commissioner, in his remarks in June, also addressed criticisms of the NBA's business relationship with China, given its human rights abuses of the Uyghur population, and pointed out that a number of other U.S. companies also do business with the country.

Silver said that virtually every Fortune 100 company is doing business in China, from a policy standpoint. We have an enormous trade relationship with China. The clothes you wear, the shoes you wear, are made in China, and almost all of the phones in this room are made in China. From a larger societal standpoint, this is something we need to look at the U.S. government for direction. According to the league's viewership data, the NBA fans in China are watching games at levels close to where they were before Morey's comments in 2019.