Sports in the Transnational Public Sphere: Findings from the Case of Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong Tweet

Abstract

On October 4, 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), shared on Twitter a slogan: ‘fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong’ in support of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. This tweet raised a rapidly growing fallout in both China and the US. This paper aims to assess sports in the transnational public sphere through Morey’s case. We monitored ‘Morey (莫雷)’ on Twitter, Sina Weibo, Baidu Index, Google trends, and Nexis News from October 4 to December 31, 2019. Our findings show that Morey's tweet offended Chinese Houston Rockets fans, which urged them to attack Morey on Twitter. The butterfly effect exerted influence onto the Chinese Basketball Association and the NBA, and gradually turned sports-related issues into politics- and business-related issues. Chinese NBA fans made the Chinese, American, and overseas public spheres overlap and contributed to the formation of a transnational public sphere. Therefore, the international political debates went into a ‘spiral of silence’, and faded out with the success of the ‘American value’. With globalization, sports inevitably intertwine with the transnational public sphere, so long as political conflicts continue. However, the globalization of sports ought to stress diversity and multiculturalism and remain uncontaminated by politics.