Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is the face of NBA's uneasy China relationship

JOE TSAI, THE billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets, made his fortune in China. His company, Alibaba, began in a Hangzhou apartment and has since been described as «Amazon on steroids.» When Tsai bought into the NBA, commissioner Adam Silver predicted he'd be «invaluable» to the league's expansion in the world's largest market.

Two and a half years later, Tsai personifies the compromises embedded in the NBA-China relationship, which brings in billions of dollars but requires the league to do business with an authoritarian government and look past the kind of social justice issues it is fighting at home.

In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. In China, Alibaba, under Tsai's leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a «campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance» through state-of-the-art racial profiling.

Tsai has publicly defended some of China's most controversial policies. He described the government's brutal crackdown on dissent as necessary to promote economic growth; defended a law used to imprison scores of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong as necessary to squelch separatism; and, when questioned about human rights, asserted that most of China's 1.4 billion citizens are «happy about where they are.»

A former college lacrosse player with investments in the WNBA, Major League Soccer and professional lacrosse, Tsai sees himself as a bridge between two increasingly polarized cultures, according to sources close to him who spoke on condition of anonymity. He believes China's restrictions on personal freedoms have paved the way for economic development that has improved the lives