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NY Review, Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
Review
Court Favorite
By Jonathan Mirsky
Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire,
American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar
by Brook Larmer
Gotham, 350 pp., $26.00
At seven feet six inches tall and about three
hundred pounds, Yao Ming, the basketball
superstar who plays for the Houston Rockets, is,
for many Americans, the most famous living
Chinese. In 2002 he was the number-one overall
pick in the National Basketball Association
(NBA)'s initial selection round the first
foreigner who had never played for an American
university to be the first chosen. In April, when
he broke his foot in his fourth year playing for
Houston, it was global front-page news. His
contract with Reebok alone (he is also sponsored
by Pepsi-Cola, McDonald's, and other
corporations) is worth tens of millions of
dollars. These sponsors were probably pleased by
Yao's superior performance last season: he
averaged 22.6 points and 10.3 rebounds per game,
statistics that put him in the top tier of NBA
players today. As Brook Larmer observes in
Operation Yao Ming, Yao has been a "conduit for
American business and sports coming to the Middle Kingdom."
Brook Larmer is a veteran reporter for Newsweek,
and he currently serves as the magazine's
Shanghai bureau chief. In his lively,
intelligent, and well-informed book he surveys
the history of Chinese basketball, recalling that
American missionaries brought the sport to China
at the end of the nineteenth century, and that it
developed through the Republican and Communist
periods. During the early Communist era, sports
were regarded as revolutionary activitieseven
Mao's guerrilla soldiers were known to play
basketball. But the fate of sports changed in
1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution when
they were suddenly condemned as "a danger-ous
manifestation of bourgeois self-centeredness,"
and once-prestigious athletes were tormented by the Red Guards.
By 1969, sports were again declared worthy of
praise. As Larmer points out, sports remain one
of the few business activities in China still
under state control, so much so that the NBA's
most sophisticated and ruthless entrepreneurs
make great efforts to avoid offending Beijing.
"Even as tens of millions of Chinese shed the
socialist work unit, the sports machine remains
one of the last 'womb to tomb' social structures,
a relic of the past that continues only because
it has been so successful," Larmer writes.
No one is more aware than Yao Ming of the Chinese
state's involvement in every aspect of big-time
sports, particularly since the controversy over
Wang Zhizhi, China's second-most-famous
basketball player. In 2001 Wang was granted
permission to join the Dallas Mavericks for their
20012002 season, making him the first Chinese
star to play in the NBA. At the end of the season
Wang defied the authorities' orders that he
return home and chose to stay in the US. He was
unprepared to submit himself, as has Yao, to the
state's demand that national glory take
precedence over personal fame. The Chinese
Basketball Association's vice-president, Li
Yuanwei, went to the US to meet with Wang in
February 2006 to discuss his possible return.
"It's a crucial move for him to return in an
answer to the motherland's call," Li Yuanwei said
to the press. Last April, Wang went back to China
to rejoin the national team and has been included
in the Chinese team for the 2008 Olympics. He was
greeted with stern words by the authorities, and
delivered a public apology. "I was too young to
make the right decision," he told the Chinese
press. "I hope I could make up my fault this time
and win back my place in the national team."
Both Yao and Wang had tall parents, and they all
played big-league basketball in China. During
their careers they became familiar with both the
rewards and horrors of the sport. Yao's mother,
Fang Fengdi, "Da Fang" or "Big Fang," had a
particularly troubled experience with Chinese
politics. In her youth, she was a fervently
obedient apparatchik, but in later years she was
made to suffer for her unflagging loyalty to Mao.
In 1965, aged fifteen, she was over six feet
tall. She was drafted into Shanghai's leading
sports institute, whose headquarters at No. 651
Nanjing Road once housed a social club for
British elites in the period after China's defeat
in the Opium Wars. Under Mao the building was
transformed in 1953 into the state's leading
athletic training facility; the lush grounds of
the former club were destroyed to make way for
tracks and ball fields. There she was inducted at
once in the san jinzhong, "the three togethers":
living, eating, and training with the others all
year and almost every day. In her danwei, or
"work unit" (the social unit that regulated rules
and behavior in urban Chinese labor sectors),
others decided what she would eat, wear, and
think. In addition to repetitive muscle-numbing
drills, the players were indoctrinated, during a
daily study session called "The Democratic Life
Meeting," in the particulars of Maoist thought.
They engaged, Larmer writes, in "a
self-flagellating round of confession and
repentance," a process that is still used in athletic training today.
But in mid-1966 came the upheavals and reversals
of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's previous
insistence on "big-ball" excellence gave way to
the notion that sports were a decadent Western
import that must be banished from society.[*]
Most of the best basketball players were sent off
to work at the Shanghai Fireproof Materials
Factory or at the Dragon Machine Factory. Da Fang
became caught up in the exhilaration and violence
of the moment and joined the Red Guards. Only
seventeen years old, she terrified her former
bosses and coaches. She and the other Red Guards
especially enjoyed tormenting Zhu Yong, the
sports institute's former Party secretary who in
his day had presided sanctimoniously over the
institute's rallies and study sessions. Now he
was an enemy of the state, locked up in solitary
confinement for six months, beaten, and tortured.
Although Da Fang did not personally engage in
torture, her former teammates remember "her voice
rising above the rest of the frenzied Red Guards."
By 1969 the tide turned again, as was typical in
the Maoist period, and Da Fang again showed her
flexibility and opportunism. Basketball came back
into political vogue and a new slogan was
decreed: "Friendship first, competition second."
This was intended, as Larmer comments, to impress
upon the world that the Maoists were genuine
sportsmen, and to indicate to the Chinese that
the period of huge disorder was coming to an end.
Da Fang was installed as the captain of the
national basketball team as a reward, her
teammates say, for her revolutionary zeal.
Between 1971 and 1978 she was a national
heroextolled as both an exceptional person and a
model team member. Favored by Deng Xiaoping and
Zhou Enlai, two leading Party members, Da Feng
was chosen to meet with important foreign guests
and dignitaries. In a country where sex was
officially reserved for procreation, basketball,
as Larmer writes, was sexy. At their first
international appearance, in Tehran in 1974, the
women athletes wore short high heels and dresses
that revealed the legs instead of the baggy blue
unisex suits that were customarily worn throughout the rest of the country.
By 1978, Da Fang had suffered injuries and was
exhausted. The time had come to get married, and
a perfect match was engineered: Da Fang was
paired with another basketball giant, Yao
Zhiyuan, the six-foot-ten center on the Shanghai
men's team and the father-to-be of Yao Ming. In
1980 Yao was born, weighing over eleven pounds
and showing signs that he would grow to be an enormous adult.
Da Fang's continued success was thwarted soon
thereafter by the mercurial shifts in Party
politics. Zhu Yong, the Party secretary whom Da
Fang had harried and humiliated, was restored to
power as the deputy director of the Shanghai
sports commission. When she encountered him
sometime later and he snubbed her, she told him:
"It was not my decision to denounce you back
then. It was an order from above!" Zhu Yong, now
in charge of assigning work to athletes, exiled
Da Fang to what a former teammate described as
"the worst job in the sports system," a menial
job stocking bathrooms at a residence for retired
athletes. Later she became a clerk in the
Shanghai Sports Science Research Institute. She
and her husband, both unqualified for anything
except Chinese-style basketball, now made about
half the average salary of an urban household.
They "languished in relative poverty for most of
the next two decades," Larmer writes, condemned
because of Da Fang's "bad political past." Most
of the family income went to feeding their
increasingly enormous son, who at eight years old
was five feet seven inches tall.
As boys in the 1980s, Wang Zhizhi and Yao Ming
(who is three years younger than Wang) were
measured carefully. The officials who examined
them predicted they would both grow to over seven
feet. Their lives, as Larmer writes, "would trace
the arc of China's inexorable rise and its fitful
emergence into the world.... They would be pushed
and pulled by forces far beyond their families'
control." Bred for athletic stardom, these two
ballplayers were projections of China's ambitions
for a more powerful international presence. An
army of Party officials, doctors, coaches,
minders, and ideological tutors surrounded them.
Their parents understood very well what was going
on. They themselves, after all, had been paired
off by the state and its eugenicists "in the
expectation that they would produce a new generation of giants."
In the eyes of the Party, it is size that
demonstrates Chinese power. As Larmer explains,
while many Chinese athletes have achieved
world-class status in non-contact
sportsbadminton, weight lifting, shooting,
diving, and ping-pong, to name a fewnot one of
them has ever carried the national flag at the
Olympics' opening ceremonies. This honor has been
assigned exclusively to basketball players, who
have carried the flag in all six summer Olympics
in which China participated since 1984. Only
players of what Mao called the "big ball sports"
"can literally make the five-star flag fly just a
little higher than every other nation's."
Sports doctors continued to monitor Yao Ming
throughout his childhood. In 1992, when he was
twelve years old and six feet two inches tall,
they examined his pubic hair and fingered his
testicles. In their view, delayed puberty argued
strong growth later on, and this, they concluded,
would be the case with Yao. They predicted he
would grow to seven feet four inches. Clumsy and
slow as a child, Yao showed little aptitude for
basketball. He says "he hated basketball with a
passion." But the state had marked him as a
player, and that was that. China chose its
promising athletes carefully from among its vast
population and placed them under the direction of
coaches who served, Larmer writes, as mentors and
guardians. They insisted that a young sportsman's
job was to serve the motherland, a lesson Yao
Ming's parents had absorbed and passed on to
their son. He and his fellow child athletes were
trained according to a system designed by the
Russians, and they played in a "joyless silence
that shrouded them...completely." As part of his
conditioning, and this was true of all big
Chinese sports, Yao was fed a pharmacopoeia of
traditional plants and insects, combined with
muscle-building drugs that many believe were brought to China by East Germans.
But whereas Yao's parents had been motivated by
revolutionary passion, Larmer suggests, the
communism of Yao's post-Mao generation had lost
much of its spirit; nationalism and, much later,
success in the market for athletic talent became
the motivating forces for young basketball
players. This dimming of Maoist ideology began
after the "ping-pong diplomacy" of 1972 that
brought Richard Nixon to China, and continued
after the Tiananmen killings of 1998. When China
became an international pariah, its leaders tried
to revive national pride, which, ironically,
Larmer points out, "ran counter to the nation's
growing infatuation with all things American,
from KFC to the NBA." The dream of making money
resulted in a trickle, then a flood, of foreign investments.
At age thirteen, nearly six-foot-six Yao was
transferred to the Shang-hai Sports Technology
Institute. His coaches feared that he might be
injured because he was growing so fast. They
treated him, Larmer says, like a Ming vase and
excused him from many of the intense drills
endured by his fellow students. He was given a
room with a custom-made seven-foot-ten-inch bed.
At fourteen he was six foot nine, nearly as tall
as his father. By 1997, at seven foot four, he
had become the tallest basketball player in China.
Nike and the NBA were already searching for
Chinese basketball stars who could market their
products. A Chinese playera novelty for the
American audiencewearing the shoes of the
world's biggest sports-shoe company would attract
millions of young buyers in China and abroad.
"What Nike truly craved," Larmer writes, "was a
hero, a local icon who could do for the swoosh
[Nike's logo] in China what Michael Jordan had
done in the rest of the world." The goal was to
pry potential superstars from behind "the walls
of the old socialist sports system, toiling away
in a rigid regimen that seemed to stifle their
ambitions and stunt their development." Beijing's
oppositions to such overseas stardom could be
overcome by the proper guanxi (or connections).
Mastery of this knotty system of business
relationships could enable a breach of even the
stoutest ideological walls. Agents for Nike and
the NBA courted officials and army commanders and
began convincing them that American money would
be distributed widely to teams, training camps,
other institutions, and, inevitably in China, bribed officials.
The dream of the vast China market, harking back
to the East India Company in the late eighteenth
century, has fired much Western ambition and
avarice and rarely yielded great profits. But the
multitrillion-dollar sports industry, which
according to the historian Walter LaFeber may be
the world's most globalized business apart from
drug trafficking, steadily penetrated China, with
Nike Inc. and the NBA in the vanguard. Larmer
describes how by the mid-1980s, Chinese national
basketball stars were being invited to tour
America and scrimmage with such global
celebrities as Michael Jordan, who was already a
hero to many young people in China. But so deeply
ingrained was the official Chinese view that
sports should ennoble rather than entertain that
the NBA ran into obstacles even when it offered
to pay handsomely for Chinese participation in
its programs. For many years, Larmer observes,
the CBA disliked revealing the statistics of
individual players "lest it disrupt the
harmonious team emphasis." The dealings of the
sports establishment with the NBA exposed deeply
held Chinese convictions and fears. Resentment
over past humiliations and intrusions into
national sovereignty were expressed by officials
who sought to block Chinese athletes from playing
abroad. Such resentments soured relations with
foreign entrepreneurs who were offering the
athletes and their Chinese employers stupefying
sums to wear their products, especially their
shoes, and play before international fans, who
numbered in the hundreds of millions.
The authorities feared embarrassment and loss if
an athlete defected (hardly any have) or if a
team played badly. The sums that Nike, Reebok,
and the NBA offered to athletesat first tens of
thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then
millions of dollars made the Chinese leaders
anxious; the best Chinese players were paid more
than most citizens, but their salaries in China
were still meager by American standards. Chinese
officials feared that their stars would be
tempted to abandon China. Their objections were
also based on racial fears; Chinese sports
bosses, like many ordinary Chinese, were
convinced that black Americans, the core of
American sports, were too strong and boisterous
for what the Chinese leaders saw as relatively puny and self-effacing Chinese.
American entrepreneurs were looking for heroes to
use their sports shoes. The sixteen-year-old,
seven-foot-two Yao Ming seemed a good candidate.
Even nearer the ideal was Wang Zhizhi, three
years older, almost as tall, and a player for the
national team, who received a Nike contract that
immensely increased his salary. At around the
same time, Nike began its steady courtship of Yao
Ming's parents. Yao Ming was invited to attend a
basketball camp in Paris, and by 1998 he was
added to Nike's High Five American team, "an odd
assortment of wealthy white suburban kids,
inner-city toughs, and some of the best athletes
in California." Yao was almost a foot taller than
anyone else. But while he had some good shots, he
was unable and unwilling to perform the
"highest-percentage shot in basketball,
especially for players over seven feet tall": the
slam dunk. Dunking was intolerable to the gentle
Yao, who had a "deeply inculcated aversion to
showing off and hurting other players' feelings."
Yao's American coach eventually got him to dunk
by making the rest of the team run penalty laps
whenever Yao avoided the shot. His teammates
begged him to dunk, and eventually he agreedand began to enjoy it.
Larmer tells the story of Yao Ming and Wang
Zhizhi's ascendance to the NBA with so much
detail that readers may flag. But his exhaustive
account sheds light on China's steely methods of
negotiation in the post-Maoist period. Once they
decided to let stars like Wang Zhizhi and Yao
Ming go to the United States, the Chinese
authorities proved to be the hardest hagglers the
NBA moguls had ever encountered. They first
demanded half of the many millions paid to Yao
Ming, but settled for much less. For giving up
Yao, the Shanghai Sharks, Yao's home team, stand
to get close to $15 million during Yao's career.
Recalling his dealings with Chinese negotiators,
one NBA official said, "It was all about
measuring the value of their investment. It could
have been a Boeing 727 they were talking about.
They treated Yao Ming strictly as an asset."
But he was an asset in America, too. In 2000 and
2001 several major basketball stars like Patrick
Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and Hakeem Olajuwon were
preparing to retire. Yao Ming was a terrific
prospect, a possible number-one draft choice. As
the Chinese wavered about letting Yao travel
abroadthey were still terrified by Wang Zhizhi's
apparent defectionthe NBA officials emphasized
that a number-one draft pick could earn almost
$10 million over three years, plus tens of
millions more in endorsements. Apart from his
salary, he might earn as much as $1 billion in
endorsements over his entire career. The NBA and
sponsors like Nike and Pepsi knew, and tried to
make the Chinese realize, that millions of fans
in Amer-ica wanted something exotic: very tall,
very gifted, and from the mysterious East.
Larmer excels in describing the difference
between Chinese and American basketball. The
Chinese model of repetitive, almost militaristic
training is best suited to disciplines that
require fierce attention to detail, such as
gymnastics, diving, and shooting. In a "big-ball"
sport like basketball, Chinese outside shooters
are highly skilled because they take a thousand
practice shots every day, but they lack
spontaneity and creativity. Nike and the NBA
sought to brighten China's dreary basketball
scene with "baggy shorts and gyrating dancers."
They introduced shouting emcees to enliven the
crowd with rousing cheers, like jiayou! "let's
go!" (a variation on the customary cheers of
xiongqi, "erection," to encourage the home team
and yangwei, "impotent," to disparage the opposition).
One major distinction between Chinese and
American basketball cultures is China's
"fifty-year obsession," in Larmer's words, "with
cultivating big men." A small but notable number
of Chinese players have made it into the NBA, but
never as point guards, a position traditionally
held by "small" men, six feet tall or slightly
shorter, who are valued for their spontaneity and
their ability to think for themselves. These
qualities are discouraged and suppressed in
Chinese athletes, although they are increasingly
prized in commerce, science, and some of the
arts. In China "small" men are coached to bring
the ball forward so that taller players can
shoot. As Peter Hessler, a Beijing-based American
journalist who has also written about Yao Ming,
notes, "It's significant that China has yet to
produce a great male guardthe position requires
skill and intensity rather than height."
Because they have watched American basketball on
television, Chinese young people have started to
admire small players. Some now find Yao Ming "too
tall, too square, too establishment." Not far
from Tiananmen, Larmer has seen courts crowded
with youngsters practicing NBA-style moves, "a
sharp, almost subversive contrast with the
robotic players going through the motions at the
sports schools." China's basketball establishment
fears the "individualistic, hip-hop culture" of
the NBA, but Chinese fans love it. The Shanghai
Sharks, for whom Yao used to play, can barely
attract crowds anymore; people would rather stay home and watch NBA games.
In America, by contrast, Yao is popular not just
because he is very good and extraordinarily tall,
but because of his "retro appeal." He is known as
a "modest and methodical" player of what Yao
himself calls a "blue-collar game." Racial
prejudice, Larmer claims, also partly accounts
for Yao's great popularity, which may exceed even
Shaquille O'Neal's. As Magic Johnson, Larry Bird,
and Michael Jordan, among other superstars of the
1980s and 1990s, began to retire, a number of
players with long rap sheets were admitted to the
league. And as the great black basketball veteran
Charles Barkley remarked, "The white audience
doesn't like to see a bunch of guys with tattoos
and cornrows who get in trouble all the time." As
an "honorary white" in America, Yao has given
globalization a new twist; nonetheless, he is
said to be well-liked by black players.
Yao is very careful. He is still, Larmer says,
"the dutiful Chinese son, eager to please his
elders...." He lives in an expensive Houston
suburb with his mother. Da Fang chose and
furnished the house, cooks his meals, washes his
clothes. True to type, his girlfriend is a tall
basketball player. Yao is becoming more
Americanized every year. He has an apartment to
himself in the Houston house and though famously
good-natured, he has begun arguing with referees.
But he fears the ostracism and obloquy that Wang
Zhizhi suffered when he tried to stay in the US.
"In China," Yao told Peter Hessler, "the goal has
always been to glorify the country. I'm not
opposed to that. But...I want people in China to
know that part of why I play basketball is simply personal."
Brook Larmer's book, comprehensively researched,
tells us much about China from an unusual angle.
"In the end," he concludes, "it was Yao, not
Wang, who was the loyal soldier, the obedient
son, the towering icon who made Chinese feel good
about themselves and their nation's place in the
world." True enough, but Xu Jicheng, a Chinese
sports journalist who once played basketball for the army, told Larmer:
Sports were the first area in which China
could compete with the world, but they will be
the last area to reform.... Winning the 2008
Olympics was the best news China could ever have
received. But it was the worst news for the
sports system, because it keeps it from reforming.
This seems true. For all Yao's success in the US
and his popularity in China, Chinese sports
remain under the control of state officials who
want to maintain their power over a closed and tightly disciplined world.
Notes
[*] For new light on this period see The Chinese
Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph
W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G.
Walder (Stanford University Press, 2006).
