Seven-foot-six Chinese star Yao Ming's assessment of his first trip home with his NBA team was on the money.

"I'm here on business,'' the affable Yao said.

Seeking big business in China are the NBA and six corporate partners representing some of America's wealthiest global companies - McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Eastman Kodak, Reebok and Disney. The NBA's first foray into the People's Republic, called the China Games, featured the Houston Rockets and Sacramento Kings in two exhibition games inside refurbished and sold-out arenas, in Shanghai, Yao's hometown, Thursday, and Sunday in Beijing.

China's global ascendancy has the NBA and its partners fixated on a mountain of marketing opportunities. A rising superpower and host of the 2008 Olympic Games, China is part communist, part capitalist and home to 1.3 billion people. Emerging from China's "economic reform" are savvy, young consumers with a taste for Western-style living.

"That makes the marketing opportunity that much more robust," said Howard Jacobs, president of Millsport, the sponsorship and sports consulting unit of Dallas-based The Marketing Arm.

The 1987 All-Star game was the first NBA broadcast in China. NBA games now reach 314 million Chinese households. NBA surveys show 75 percent of Chinese males, aged 15 to 24, are NBA fans. Tickets to both exhibition games sold out in a flash, said Andrew Messick, NBA senior vice president, international.

"We try to get closer to our fans and build our fan base and make our fans happy," Messick said. "That can be expressed in playing basketball games in Shanghai and Beijing or by having good broadcast relationships so that people can watch (NBA games) on television. Or, it could be having the abilities for a basketball fan to be able to buy a Yao Ming replica jersey. There is a commercial interest which is interesting for us. But, also, it's part of our stewardship of the NBA business and the NBA brand.''

The more than 600 McDonald's stores in China celebrated the NBA's arrival with special combo meals. Disney promoted Hong Kong Disneyland. Reebok unveiled the first Yao signature shoe, available at Reebok's first free-standing retail store in Beijing. Players from the Rockets and Kings appeared on cans and bottles of Coke.

Yet, as the NBA sells its game and merchandise to China's masses, and American companies become further rooted in China's vigorous marketplace, deplorable conditions linger like a stench over any economic advances. Most notable is the Chinese government's contempt for basic human rights.

"China is a member of the (World Trade Organization)," Messick said. "If somebody is prepared to not buy goods that are sourced in China and to forego all of the other benefits that low-cost exports provide, that's a perfectly reasonable choice for someone to make. . . . Larger questions of politics and policy, I'm not sure there is a larger role for us there.''

In fact, the NBA has had trouble policing itself. In 2001, the National Labor Committee, a global watchdog based in New York, found NBA merchandise being produced in sweatshops in El Salvador. Earlier this year, the NBA embarrassingly cleared out stacks of sweatshirts from its flagship store that had been imported from military-ruled Burma after most U.S. companies had abandoned Burma at the urging of President Bush.

Major NBA advertisers Reebok and Nike have both been cited for operating sweatshop-condition factories in China.

"On a personal level, a lot of people have a lot of issues," Messick said. "But we're a basketball league."

The American companies aligned with the NBA, Jacobs said, all weigh risk against economic reward. And their bottom line is, if they don't seize opportunity in China - regardless of American principles - somebody else will.

Source: China Daily/agencies