For some reason, a lot of people have convinced themselves that youth around the world all value rebellion and standing up for freedom. It’s not true. It’s especially not true in China. Young people in China are generally ultra nationalist and they support virtually everything the government does. If China bans something, the overwhelming majority of them will have a dozen reasons why it’s an excellent decision ready to go.

Don’t count on young people to take the west’s side on anything. They enjoy our media and the products our mega corporations make, but they don’t need them and they’ll switch to Chinese alternatives instantly.

>Young people in China are generally ultra nationalist and they support virtually everything the government does.

Many Westerners have trouble coming to terms with things like "Not all the Chinese hate the CCP", or "Russians are just regular people like you and me."

How many anti-government protests have you seen in China?

>How many Chinese will pay attention to "whatever those people are doing in Hong Kong" for the first time because of this ?

Most of them are already aware, and due to state ran media and an ultra-nationalistic view, are in full support of CCP and are very much against HK and their protests.

Here is a video from a guy who lived in China for over a decade, is married to a mainland Chinese woman, has family both in Hong Kong as well as Mainland, and how it's destroying his family due to the Mainlander's views of Hong Kong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4wbx9hIN4E

He finishes the video by saying: "there is no oppression here guys".

Which is blatantly false. I know it's a tired meme, but there's an Orwellian panopticon powered by computers which literally rates each and every person by their level of socially desirable metrics and materially affects their daily life. That is oppression of freedom, and it's only the beginning. We've been down this road before with other autocracies in the past, but they weren't powered by machine learning...

That being said the video did give an important perspective of the overwhelming level of patriotism the Chinese people have for their country.

> How many Chinese will pay attention to "whatever those people are doing in Hong Kong" for the first time because of this ?

If they've been living under a rock where they didn't notice the defacement of the national emblem at the Liaison Office when it was widely condemned in the state media, they're not going to notice the NBA getting cancelled.

You can't expect them to miraculously find a source that doesn't condemn this as an attack on the national sovereignty of China by American imperialists.

Its curious how could you pitch the cancellation of these NBA games to the audience expecting to watch these NBA games without causing a Streisand effect [1]? If you mention the tweet, will they want to seek out and find the tweet?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Wrap it in propaganda like everything else. When you have already established a narrative framework under which China are the good guys, and whatever is happening in Hong Kong as bad or insidious, it's easy to simply wrap it up in that package and say it's the evil West trying to hurt China.

> Which is to say, what if lots of young Chinese stand up and take notice that they can't watch world class professional basketball anymore ?

It is arguably the Young that start this online campaign to call NBA out. The government/brands follow the suits.

The tension is high. I think watching NBA is soon to be deemed as unpatriotic by social media, and that will be one of the long-lasting legacy of this event.

I wonder if you'll now lose social credit for watching NBA / wearing NBA products?

Social credit in a public shaming sense maybe.

There's a meme post in China Intranet, a HK guy murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan, so a mainland Chinese now can not watch NBA.

Butterfly effect.