The NBA's Drive Towards China's Market

The Unites States government and its policies are not the most popular abroad. That really doesn’t matter if U.S. culture continues to spread to the world’s youth. The march of U.S. soft diplomacy persists as the NBA has decided to start a subsidiary marketing company in China according to the International Herald Tribune.

Basketball is a sport that I could care less about and I couldn’t be happier for its waning popularity in the U.S, but I was completely unaware of its mass appeal in China. According to the article, one-third of all website traffic to NBA.com is routed through their Mandarin site. Moreover, the NBA estimates that 300 million people play basketball in China, equal to the population of the United States.