One Wing To Rule Them All: Part II
From Muscular Christianity to Michael Jordan to Enes Kanter (Freedom): the meaning of basketball in China cannot be diagrammed.
(Part I of One Wing To Rule Them All can be read here.)
“To perform at the highest level possible, our goal cannot be an external reward; rather, one must be so immersed in the action that the playing becomes an end in itself, free of distraction and desire. Competition... isn’t focused on defeating the ‘other,’ but on overcoming the obstacles that suspend the sort of mindful surrendering necessary for optimal performance.”
--- Dirk Dunbar, The Dao of Hoops.
“So, when people say: ‘What do you think about when you shoot?’ I’m like: absolutely nothing.”
--- Stephen Curry, Under Armour Commercial: "The Greatest 3PT Shooter. 2974 and Counting."
If Dirk Dunbar hadn’t blown out his knee ten games into his sophomore year at college, he might have made a splash in the NBA. He led the nation in scoring in high school and attracted the interest of professional agents and scouts as a freshman at Central Michigan University. Even after his injury, he ended up playing and coaching in Europe for a decade. Today, he is a humanities professor at Northwest Florida State University, where, among other things, he teaches an introductory course in world religions. By his own account, Dunbar has been fascinated with Daoism since high school.
So you don’t have to take my word for it when I start rambling on about the congruencies between basketball as practiced in its highest form and the principles of Daoist philosophy. Dirk Dunbar is a first-hand correspondent from the realm where non-action (wuwei) and spontaneous self-becoming (ziran) make sense in the context of staggered screens and split actions and dribble hand-offs.
He makes his case in a wonderful little essay, The Dao of Hoops, published in 2008 in the anthology Basketball and Philosophy.
“Basketball is a process, not something that can be controlled, diagrammed, or mechanically executed. In nearly all cases, a balance must be found, for whenever an action is forced or agenda-driven rather than allowed to happen, the opposite of the intended outcome may well occur... To balance yin and yang on the basketball court requires a blending of seemingly conflicting opposites such as competition and surrender, strategy and spontaneity, aggression and patience, and self-sufficiency and teamwork.”
Dunbar excels at evoking the self-contradictory essence of the crucial Daoist concept of wuwei.
“Literally translated as ‘no action,’ wuwei does not mean passivity, but a natural, unstructured, playful, and egoless mode of action that is quite different from the socially regulated activity emphasized in the Chinese Confucian tradition. By embodying wuwei, the person of the Dao is as effortless as flowing water.... wuwei does not mean that one is merely reactive or content to avoid obstacles to personal development; rather wuwei means acting in such perfect accord with the environment that you become so completely absorbed in what is happening that your sense of self is not limited to a locality, but is part of the process or field of action.”
Basketball players have their own jargon to describe this state of clarity: they call it being in the zone. The question is: how do you get there? Remember Cook Ding, the butcher who Zhuangzi described as so in the zone that he never needed to sharpen his cleaver? As he told his curious duke, achieving the exalted state of perfect accord is far from easy. It doesn’t happen all at once, in a burst of divine inspiration. It takes practice. It takes sweat. You gotta get those shots up.
“To learn to go with the flow” writes Dunbar, “is not a matter of will but requires thousands of hours of training and ceaseless practice of disciplined surrender.”
"The formation of basketball is based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The opposition and unity of its own offensive and defensive confrontation are the most basic characteristics of the development of basketball in the contradictory movement.”
It is tempting to theorize that China’s love affair with basketball is a tribute to the remarkable fact that the game’s style of play plugs into both the Dao and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology. But scholars who have studied the rise of organized physical education in China offer a much more pragmatic explanation. The YMCA viewed the introduction of “muscular Christianity” as a strategy for civilizing the heathen, but the Chinese had their own pressing reasons for wanting to get buffed.
The Qing dynasty literati regarded sport as vulgar. P.E. did not exist in Chinese schools; the scholars who staffed China’s government bureaucracy preferred poetry to physical exertion. But China’s weakness in the face of Western (and eventually Japanese) military and industrial might provoked enormous concern among the elite in the late 19th and early 20th century. Among the multitude of self-criticisms the country levied against itself: China was a nation of 90-pound weaklings attempting to match up against a horde of muscle-bound jocks. If China was to emerge intact from a no-holds-barred competition with the Great Powers of the world, the literati were going to have put down their calligraphy brushes and start doing pushups.
“The crucial link,” writes Andrew Morris in To Make the Four Hundred Million Move’: The Late Qing Dynasty Origins of Modern Chinese Sport and Physical Culture, “with the late Qing turn to matters of the individual body and racial-national strength, quite simply, was the Chinese discovery of nineteenth-century Western writings on evolution and human progress as a deciding factor in the course of history.... the powerful discourses on the interrelatedness of moral, intellectual, and physical education, or on physical preparedness and competition in a ruthless world, never could have arisen in Chinese reformist circles without Spencerian and Darwinian nudges.”
Yan Fu, the 19th century Chinese writer and translator who was the first to introduce the concepts of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” to China, explicitly believed, writes Zhang Huijie in her dissertation Missionary Schools, The YMCA and The Transformation of Physical Education and Sport in Modern China (1840–1937), “that increasing the physical strength of the Chinese was one of China’s most pressing tasks... Strengthening the physique of the Chinese was a priority in strengthening the nation and the Chinese race.”
Organized basketball competitions, writes Morris, “were understood to be of vital relevance as make-believe Darwinist struggles that could cultivate the competitive instinct so necessary for survival in the modern world.”
This intersection of vastly different agendas -- evangelical conversion vs. Darwinist-motivated self-strengthening -- delightfully complicates a one-sided cultural imperialist narrative that positions the West as eternal aggressor and China as eternal victim. Zhang frames it nicely: “the Chinese Nationalist government appropriated Western sports [as part of] its own nation-building projects. ... Chinese nationalists ... were inclined to Christianity’s program of physical education and sport because these activities could be an effective tool to easily apply the ‘Western project of modernity’ to China....”
So even at its weakest, China executed a strategy that co-opted Western missionary indoctrination as a tool for self-improvement. With the script thus flipped, it might be instructive to review the next wave of Western basketball imperialists that arrived in China in search of converts.
“The sun never sets on the NBA empire.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, American sports journalists amused themselves by describing the National Basketball Association’s plans for global supremacy as if the league was an actual imperial power, flush with gunboats and demands for extra-territorial concessions. One mindboggling article in Sports Illustrated, published in 2005, went so far as to praise NBA commissioner David Stern for “expanding his domain” ... by “colonizing markets from Buenos Aires to Bangalore.” (Italics mine!)
The original derivation of “the sun never sets on the (Holy Roman/Spanish/British) empire” formulation is disputed. But for our purposes, the most interesting use of this rhetorical flourish was delivered by George Macartney, an 18th century British diplomat and colonial administrator. In 1773 he wrote that Great Britain’s territorial gains after The Seven Years War had delivered unto it “a vast Empire, upon which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained.” This grandiloquence, one might note, came at a juncture when the British conquest of India had barely gotten under way and the Opium Wars were still a good 75 years in the future. The Brits were just getting started!
Macartney’s greatest claim to fame derives from his role as leader of the “Macartney Embassy” to China in 1792. That mission, launched with great hoopla, was intended to convince the Qianlong Emperor to open China up to foreign trade. It was a miserable failure. It’s most notable accomplishment? Qianlong defended his intransigence by writing an infamous letter to King George III, explaining, in notoriously condescending terms, that there was nothing Britain (or the rest of the world) produced that China wanted or needed.
It is not much of an exaggeration to observe that for China, everything went downhill from the moment Qianlong hit send on that text. The Great Powers of Europe channeled the fruits of the industrial revolution and advances in military technology into colonial dominance. For generations Qianlong’s letter was mocked as a testament to short-sighted complacency. A hundred years later, Britain was busy forcing China to sign unequal treaties, that, among other things, protected the rights of the world’s Christian missionaries to do whatever they wanted, including teaching the youth of China how to play basketball.
From a contemporary standpoint, British colonialist arrogance sounds a tone significantly more historically repugnant than Qianlong’s obduracy. But that’s precisely why the NBA’s expansion into China in the 1990s was so metaphorically resonant -- and tone deaf. In the 1890s, the missionary introduction of muscular Christianity took place in the context of perceived Western cultural superiority. The 1990s reran the same play, but this time, the interlopers weren’t missionaries bringing the word of god, but NBA marketers bringing the word of globalization.
A heavy dose of American superstar idol worship came along for the ride: This was American “soft power” at its mightiest. With Michael Jordan and the Dream Team as avatars of global basketball greatness, the NBA was as unstoppable as a “Showtime” Lakers fast break. A generation of Chinese that came of age after the Cultural Revolution and in the middle of the “reform and opening era” ate it all up. They watched NBA games on Chinese television. They bought NBA merchandise. They craved the hip hop life-style. Western observers unanimously concluded that Chinese NBA fandom was an implicit rebuke to decades of Chinese Communist cultural repression. Celebrating teamwork was boring; individual greatness was the new rage. Globalization, capitalism, and Michael Jordan: all were inevitable. To get rich was glorious.
Andrew Morris, the West’s premier expert on the history of sport in China, captured the moment with hard data in “I Believe I can Fly: Basketball Culture in Post-Socialist China,” published in 2002.
“’The individual’ is a central concept in Chinese basketball culture today, and one that its Chinese subjects wear well. The surveys returned to me were full of observations about what basketball meant to all these ‘selves’ across China -- that the game is ‘my choice’ or that it ‘shows my skills.’ Many respondents’ parents support their interest in basketball because it is ‘my interest’ or ‘my ideal’ or ‘my life’s goal.’ Others explained that through basketball they could ‘show my own individual style’ or simply ‘make more and more people know who I am.’”
“In the NBA and its awesome propaganda machine, young Chinese have found the most potent and attractive model of this individualist spirit imaginable.... The physical mastery that goes into a slam dunk -- the flying, the momentary transcendence of any team or group concept -- have made this feat not just a focus for consumer desires but the ultimate life goal of many youth in China today. Among these young people of post-socialist China, the point is no longer to serve the people but to dunk in an opponent’s face.”
The NBA made globalization look like a gas. As Judy Polumbaum observed in her magnificent “From Evangelism to Entertainment: The YMCA, the NBA, and the Evolution of Chinese Basketball,” “YMCA basketball was enveloped in rectitude and moral fervor; NBA basketball proclaims hedonism and display.”
What’s not to like?
By 2010, China hosted more NBA events than any other country outside of the United States -- and the NBA’s popularity, argued Pu Haozhou in From "Ping-Pong Diplomacy" to "Hoop Diplomacy": Yao Ming, Globalization, and the Cultural Politics of U.S.-China Relations “could be explained as a reflection of neoliberalism sweeping [the] Chinese market since the economic reform in 1980s.... The popularity of the NBA in China symbolizes the proliferation of capitalist ideas...”
In the summer of 2017, Steph Curry made his way to Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, where the Chinese professional basketball team, the Sichuan Blue Whales, (formerly the Blue Sword Beer Pandas!), makes its home. Later that fall, Warriors President Rick Welts told the San Francisco Chronicle that “We want to be China’s team in the NBA.”
And then, in October 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted out six words: “Fight For Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong.”
And the sun set on the NBA empire.
As memes go, the photographs of the custom-painted basketball shoes posted to Twitter and Instagram by NBA center Enes Kanter on October 25 could not possibly have been more accurately designed to draw the attention of Chinese censors and enrage patriotic Chinese netizens. One side of the shoe featured a cartoon of the Tiananmen Massacre’s “Tank Man” holding a basketball and facing off against two tanks bearing Winnie the Pooh heads. (Because of a perceived likeness between Winnie the Pooh and China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping, images of the bear have often been deployed on Chinese social media as an oblique act of criticism). The other side of the shoe depicts Kanter demonically squeezing a disembodied Pooh head in his hands.
An only in 2021 headline: Enes Kanter (Freedom) declares meme warfare against the People’s Republic of China.
A recent timeline of Enes Kanter (Freedom):
October 20: Wears “Free Tibet” basketball shoes to Boston Celtics home opener.
October 22: Wears “Free Uighur” basketball shoes to an NBA game.
October 24: Wears “Free China” basketball shoes to an NBA game.
October 25: Posts Tank Man/Pooh photos of shoes designed by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao.
October 26: Posted a tweet calling out Nike CEO Phil James and NBA all-star LeBron James for complicity in Uyghur forced labor.
November 30: Becomes a U.S. citizen, changes his name to Enes Kanter Freedom, and, during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s talk show, tells Americans who want to criticize their own country that they should “keep their mouth shut.”
December 6: Blasts Taiwanese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin for playing professionally in China: “Shame on you!”
Making sense of Enes Kanter Freedom is a mess. On the one hand, I share his antagonist stance towards China’s repression of Uighurs, crackdown on Hong Kong and occupation of Tibet. And I certainly respect his sustained, and self-endangering, criticism of Turkey’s strong man, Tayyip Erdogan. At the same time, his appearance on Tucker Carlson and slap at American domestic critics of U.S. policy is a puzzling and hypocritical betrayal of his newly chosen last name. There is an obvious element of self-serving performative showmanship in everything he does. Enes Kanter Freedom is a brand.
But what cannot be denied is that, in the two years since Daryl Morey first upset the NBA China apple-cart with his (swiftly deleted) tweet supporting Hong Kong democracy protesters, there has been a striking dearth of comment from NBA players on human rights issues related to China. This is all the more notable because, compared to members of most other high profile professional American sports, NBA players tend to be forthright on their comments on social justice, racism, and Donald Trump.
The dots are easy to connect. Daryl Morey’s outburst was a financial disaster for the league. Chinese corporations cancelled lucrative sponsorships of NBA teams. Television coverage and merchandise sales plummeted in China. By one estimate, the NBA lost $150-200 million dollars of revenue within two months of the tweet. That shortfall was predicted to have direct negative consequences for the NBA’s overall salary cap, which by extension would directly affect the pocket-book of NBA players. (The onset of Covid-19, with its consequent significant disruption of NBA finances, makes it hard to come any final quantification of the long-term financial hit from the China breakup.)
How did China and the NBA react to Enes Kanter Freedom’s provocations? On the Chinese side, the Internet giant Tencent immediately stopped streaming Celtics games, and China’s social media exploded in maelstrom of anti-Kanter, anti-Celtics bile. On the NBA side: mostly silence. But the biggest takeaway is that the “Chinese market” is no longer a supine prize waiting to be exploited by multinational globalizers. China enjoys its own agency, now, and that agency has bite.
In terms of east-west power balances, we have come a long way indeed when the power of the Chinese market places curbs on the free expression of rich American basketball players. The triumphalism of 90s globalization rhetoric now seems as distant as the Opium Wars. “Decoupling” is the new reality. Chinese technology companies are delisting from Western stock changes. China is obsessively investing in advanced semiconductor technologies in order to free itself from the last vestiges of Western dependence. Ironically, (tragically?) the end game for Xi Jinping seems to be the practical 21st century achievement of Qianlong’s dream: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.”
As I’ve written before, in Xi Jinping and John Cena are Rotten Pieces of Pork Offal, this new ability of China to influence Western markets is not an example of soft power. It’s real power.
Do the Warriors still want to be China’s NBA team? Will Steph ever make it back to Chengdu?
Step III:
The final stage: frying! First, sprinkle soy sauce on the steamed wings. Second: dredge the wings in flour. Third: fry until crispy, a process that should require just two to three minutes. Note: the temperature of the oil will plummet after a batch of wings start frying. Before proceeding to the next batch, wait until the temperature rises again. When finished, serve the wings with a bowl of Sichuan pepper/salt for dipping.
The marinating and the steaming stages of Szechwan Chicken Wings fall under the category of yin: passive, calm, unhurried, receptive. During these hours I can prep other dishes and ponder such questions as what does basketball in China mean?
The frying stage is all yang: active, explosive, dangerous. After dredging a pair of wings I drop them by hand into the wok, my fingers hovering just millimeters above the scalding oil. Guests are arriving, music is blasting, narratives are set to unfold. My favorite Chinese sports cheer: Jiayou! Add oil! Burn hotter!
The buzzer blares to signal the start of play. It’s time to watch some Warriors basketball.
But first, a mea culpa. Six years ago, in my Daoist Warrior pitch to the New Yorker, I stated that the Warriors never run predetermined “set plays.” I have since learned, through obsessive study of YouTube videos, that my assertion was incorrect. The truth is that the Warriors run one of the most complex offenses in basketball. The Warriors draw upon a bewildering variety of “actions” -- “Spain pick and rolls,” “modified split action, “floppy action,” the “horns” set -- in search of their one over-riding desire: an open shot.
Steve Kerr’s offense squares the circle: it is a structure for facilitating spontaneity. When it works as intended, it flows like water. Nothing is forced, everything is pure. But the closer you look, the more you can see the individual gears moving, the split-second decisions, the choreography of screens and dives and misdirections. The dialectic and the dao.
Patterns emerge, order is visible in the chaos, but there is never any certainty as to outcome. Because the narrative isn’t pre-written. Even Steph Currry, the greatest shooter in the history of the sport, makes less than 50 percent of his three point shot attempts. I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s why I watch.
That’s also why I also throw a lot of parties. Every constellation of guests is different. Each gathering has a unique buzz. Sometimes there’s drama. Sometimes people meet and fall in love. Sometimes they arrive with strangers who become new friends. I am always eager for the unfolding. I want to see it happen.
That’s also why I study history. Because I want to know what did happen. The crazy thing is that, the more I study, the more impermanent and chaotic the past becomes. My expectations have evolved; I no longer seek certainty; I expect to be surprised.
Consider the meaning of basketball in China:
Basketball was invented to help build Christian moral fiber. Basketball in China was an act of imperialism. Basketball was culturally appropriated by the Chinese to improve the nation’s odds of natural selection in a bloody struggle of survival of the fittest. Basketball’s emphasis on teamwork cohered to Communist collectivist values. Basketball’s celebration of the individual athletic act repudiated those values and demonstrated the glories of Western individualism.
Basketball in China constantly contradicts itself. The true meaning of basketball cannot be diagrammed.
But all history contradicts itself. From the standpoint of 2021, the generalizations of inherent Western superiority that the gunboat captains and missionaries took on faith in the 19th century are substantially undermined by the contemporary achievements of the Chinese state. The much more recent triumphalist dreams of ‘90s globalization and “the end of history” lie shattered in an age of decoupling and China-U.S. superpower confrontation. As our vantage point changes, our understanding changes along with it, or at least it should.
The way that is the true way cannot be written/spoken/trod.
But in all this chaos and confusion, this slippery fluidity, this structured spontaneity, I can guarantee one thing: if you follow the recipe, the quality of the chicken wings will be sublime.