John Oliver’s segment on public financing of sports stadiums was one of his best this year. Over twenty minutes, he skewered the profitable franchises whose owners threaten to move to another city unless taxpayers build them new stadiums with amenities like swimming pools and fish tanks. But one of his laugh lines about halfway through revealed a touch of Western-centric cultural ignorance that he usually rises above. Watch this part about the Milwaukee Bucks:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs?start=787]
Tom Barrett, the Mayor in the clip, is surprised and delighted that a random Chinese person would recognize a Milwaukee Bucks logo, taking it as a sign of Milwaukee’s symbolic relevance to world culture. Oliver is surprised to the point of total disbelief. I can tell you from experience that they are both wrong: China, like the US, is full of basketball fans who know a lot about every pro team.
In Shanghai, images of Dwight Howard and Kobe Bryant cover the sides of skyscrapers. Groups of young would-be ballers wait in long lines for time on packed public courts. When you’re a foreigner in China, taxi drivers will often ask you where you’re from and what you’re doing there. Multiple times when living in Shanghai, after I said I was from Washington, drivers would excitedly ask me if I’d seen Gilbert Arenas play.
There may even be more NBA fans in China than in the US. Of the roughly 250 million adults living in the United States today, 6% claim the NBA as their favorite sport, according to the Harris Poll’s annual survey. That gives us 15 million NBA die-hards. Now let’s triple that number to allow for people like me who have a different favorite sport but still follow the association closely and say that there are 45 million above-casual pro basketball fans in the US. As another point of reference, the 2015 NBA Finals averaged 19.94 viewers per game, the most since Michael Jordan’s last season.
Now consider the following: an estimated 300 million people play basketball recreationally in China; NBA games are routinely broadcast on CCTV5; the NBA’s 2012 Chinese New Year Celebration, taking place over 8 nights in January, averaged 10 million viewers per game. Extrapolating from China's four-times-larger population, it's not farfetched to hypothesize that if there aren't as many basketball fans in China as there are in the US, it's close.
The guy who came up to Mayor Barrett could very well have watched a Bucks game within the previous week. But in the Western popular conception, China is exotic and mysterious. So the Mayor and the late night host are varying degrees of dumbfounded. Like many Americans, they subscribe to a storybook impression of the world’s largest country.
Our culture perpetuates the stereotypes. Movies set in China are almost always about Kung Fu, gangsters, or the emperor. Well-intentioned journalists overwhelmingly write about things that cast Chinese people as the “other:” oppression of dissidents, environmental degradation, territorial aggression. It’s not that any of these things are factually inaccurate; kung fu is a thing in China, they did used to have an emperor, and they do oppress dissidents. But we only seek to produce and absorb content that reinforces our worldview.
It’s a form of American exceptionalism we’re all a little guilty of: by pointing out how strange other places are, we feel more settled about ourselves. I can’t even tell you how many times people have asked me, usually with a grin, about whether I ever ate dogs, or saw people eat dog meat, in China (in three years, I never once did). If Mayor Barrett had realized that the NBA is a global brand that people all over the world follow closely, and that a Chinese person having heard of his city's team is not noteworthy, then that incident wouldn’t have made him feel as proud Milwaukee as it clearly did. If we think about how the movies we watch, the food we eat, the music we listen to, and the sports we follow arejust as normal to people we think of as exotic as they are to us, then we feel less reassuringly sophisticated. The complexity of globalization makes thinking about the world more difficult. But we’d be better global citizens if we made the effort, instead of chuckling to ourselves about foreigners and their ways.
John Oliver is usually so good at deconstructing his audience’s cultural ignorance; this time, he fell prey to it.