Thanks for your response! I've worked in and around China for a long time and also read extensively on China (highly recommend "The Party" by Richard McGregor). So while I am not an expert by any means, I have at least a base of knowledge and experience more than the average joe.
Honestly, the NBA doesn't have the moral compass to take this sort of action, nor does really any large US corporation. Even Google only pulled out of China when it didn't matter. They were so behind in search and maps in Baidu, so when they left "due to censorship", it didn't affect their bottom line at all.
Also, people just don't care as much about sports in China as in the US. Yeah, there are 600 million "fans", but we are using that word in the broadest sense. The most hardcore of these will find ways to watch games if they are banned, the rest will just shrug it off. Even Apple, perhaps the most loved western brand in China, could be banned tomorrow and 90% of Apple users would just shrug and switch to a Huawei phone.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I am not optimistic that anything can or will be done at this point, and certainly not from the private sector. In the public sector... western governments have failed so miserably at COVID that controlling it and recovering from the economic impacts are all they will care about in the next five to ten years. The eastern democracies that have handled COVID well are too economically tethered to China. They might make some noises, but won't take any real action.
Except China already banned the NBA for a year due to some seriously softball comments over HK with zero domestic repercussions. It's just set to unban now. While this was during covid and people were obviously distracted, your scenario had already happened, and you didn't even realize it because nobody in China cared!
The Chinese government controls the message completely. The NBA is banned? It's the NBAs fault for interfering in China's domestic affairs.
Uighers have been demonized as terrorists in Chinese society for two decades. Imagine if Texas was the main source of "Radical Islamic Terrorism", and there was a program to reducate Texas Islams into good Christians. Take a good hard look at your MAGA neighbors and think, what percentage of Americans would be full throatedly in support of the program? What percentage would just be silent about it? Then add that criticism of the program would be considered treason, and then see how much of the population objects.
I know a lot of very "moral" people (good to their families, employees, give to the poor, etc), western educated Chinese professionals, who support the uigher program entirety. I don't think fundamentally they are much different than we are, they are products of their environment.
This is the same America that put the Japanese in internment camps half a lifetime ago. We might think we're so much better now, but are we? Imagine Trump crushed covid with the efficacy that the Chinese government did. Is it hard to imagine that he would now be ahead in the polls by 10, 20%? He wins and puts in place Islamic reduction camps and prosecutes all criticism as sedition.
Unlikely? Remember we just, last week(!), confirmed a Supreme Court Justice that supports gay conversion re-education therapy. She was on the board of a school that banned all gay students from admission, and even the straight kids of gay parents! This is who we have picked as the successor to RBG.
I think 100m is overstating the hardcore fan base by at least a factor of 10. You can do some fermi analysis to come up with a better ballpark number. Start with the middle class, further segment by young males, further segment by interest in NBA, then multiply by a hardcore fan factor ratio, which you could estimate by taking the ratio in the USA and applying a discount rate.