If the National Basketball Association’s product is any good, and it is, the league should not worry about the sudden furor with its Chinese fans. Some controversies need to be quelled and some just need to be allowed to blow over. This is the latter.

Prompting the blowup was a tweet from a modestly-known executive of the Houston Rockets supporting Hong Kong protesters. Almost randomly do such supernovas emerge from one or two of the 200 billion tweets issued every year. It pays not to overreact. China will not win this battle unless the NBA goes out of its way to let it. The world’s best players will not stop coming to the world’s premier stage, whereas China can only cut itself off from the most culturally regnant basketball played anywhere on the planet. There’s no prospect, now or possibly ever, of China developing a competing product.

I would rather be playing the NBA’s hand than Beijing’s in the current dust-up. The NBA has tried both to grovel and stand up for free speech, trending toward the latter since league president Adam Silver entered the fray. Here’s guessing that if the offending tweet had been sent by LeBron James or Steph Curry, the league would have been even quicker to figure out which side it’s on (also doubtful is that the Chinese government would be relishing the fight quite so much).

On the flip side, what Hong Kongers are fighting is often antiseptically described as an “erosion of their rights.” It would be better likened to a Beijing-sponsored attempt to rip out their indoor plumbing in favor of returning to outhouses. Such is the civil effect of taking their modern, rules-based legal system and trying to substitute a throwback authoritarian one, in which the party dictates the verdict.

Lately entire books and conference agendas have been devoted to suggesting, without much evidence, that Donald Trump’s election or Britain’s Brexit vote heralded a backslide toward authoritarianism. In Hong Kong, China really is testing whether a modern and free city of seven million can be time-machined back to the 19th century and turned into an anachronistic satrapy.