Entry #4: Gag Order

Protesters in Hong Kong from BBC.com

What do the recent protests in Hong Kong, the NBA, and the video game publisher Activision-Blizzard all have in common? More than you might think. Allow me to preface this question with a little context. For the last seven months, there have been mass gatherings in Hong Kong to protest a bill that would allow the Chinese government to extradite criminals in Hong Kong to mainland China. The protesters are opposed to this because the Chinese government has a habit of making people disappear. The bill has since been killed, but the protesters are now calling for complete autonomy from China. 

Now, how does the NBA fit into all of this? Basketball is very popular in China with approximately 800 million Chinese viewers during the last season of the NBA finals. The Chinese even have a favorite team, the Houston Rockets. This is important, we'll come back to it later. The NBA has been working with a Chinese tech giant called Tencent to provide a streaming service for NBA games in China. The communist party of China has complete control over the country's internet, and the government heavily censors it as well. For example, any mention of the Tienanmen square protest is impossible to find on Chinese internet. The government is also known to block things that individual officials personally don't like. The host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, John Oliver, made a joke about how the current president of China looks a lot like Winnie the Pooh. As a result, Winnie the Pooh is banned in China. Now back to the rockets. On October 6th the general manager of the rockets tweeted his support to the protesters in Hong Kong. China doesn't like it when people refer to regions such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as if they are not part of China. The general manager, Daryl Morey, subsequently deleted the tweet and the NBA tweeted a condemnation of Morey's tweet. The damage had already been done however, and the Chinese companies working with the NBA had severed relations.

Next up is Activision-Blizzard. If you're unfamiliar with this company you might have heard of some of their games. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo are highly popular titles produced by this company. Blizzard's games are incredibly popular in China and they are seeking further access to the Chinese market. Around the same time that Daryl Morey tweeted about Hong Kong, Blizzard was having an E-Sports tournament for one of its games called Hearthstone. At the end of the tournament a player from Hong Kong, Blitzchung, was being interviewed on the official live stream. Blitzchung was wearing goggles and gas mask reminiscent of the ones worn by the Hong Kong protesters, and shouted out "Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our age!" The broadcast was immediately cut short and Blizzard later released a statement. They said that Blitzchung would be banned for a year and would forfeit his winnings of $10,000, and they also fired and banned the two Taiwanese hosts of the broadcast. The backlash to this has been catastrophic, and blizzard have failed spectacularly at trying to mitigate this PR nightmare. Blizzard attempted to justify their actions by citing an obscure rule about not saying anything that would offend a group of people, and stating that their decision had nothing to do with China. Many disagree; the severity of the punishment suggests that Blizzard was trying to send a message to China that they are willing to following their censorship policies. It should also be noted that the mobile release of Call of Duty mobile is soon, and Activision-Blizzard is attempting to get approval in China to release it.

So why should you care? Well this story caught the attention of some senators and I think they describe why you should care the best.