Yao Ming's Corporate Coaxing in China

In Operation Yao Ming (Gotham Books, 2005), former Newsweek bureau chief and Shanghai resident Brook Larmer follows the 7’6” Chinese center from his birth through his 2005 season for the NBA’s Houston Rockets.

Yao’s rise is the result of two decades of American corporate coaxing at every level in the former communist state and China’s pointed national effort to produce a basketball star. Yao’s parents were encouraged by the government to wed, though his mother, Da Fang, was one of Mao’s “little revolutionary generals” who had fallen out of favor with the Communist Party. The backdrop of the story is sports, but this is not a basketball book. It’s about getting business done in the new China under the rules of old China, and the often-maddening reality of this cultural clash.

Larmer mirrors Yao’s story with that of Wang Zhi Zhi, the first Chinese player to play in the NBA. The honor made him a him a national hero in 2001, a year prior to Yao’s arrival. He later enraged party officials, and became persona non grata in China, when he refused to return to his home country after an NBA season, a decision that almost cost Yao—then negotiating a release from the country—his NBA career.

(Illustration by Dustin Glick.)