To understand why this is about far more than sports, you have to understand a few things about basketball in China.

First, hoops in China, like China itself, is huge. There are more Chinese people who play recreational basketball—300 million—than the populations of all but three of the world’s countries. About half a billion people in China watched at least one NBA game last season—more than every single person in the United States, and every other country producing current NBA stars, put together.

Second, hoops in China is big business. The NBA doesn’t reveal how much money it makes from this, but it is estimated at more than $4 billion annually. That’s why top NBA teams routinely play exhibition games in China during the off-season: It does little for most players themselves (only a few have big sneaker contracts, and every game risks a career-ending injury), but it certainly helps the bottom line for billionaire team owners and league executives.

Third, of all the NBA teams, the most popular in China is very likely the Rockets. China has produced only a single NBA megastar: Yao Ming, the Rockets’ center from 2002 to 2011. So when the Beijing bosses decided to send a message to all global corporations in all types of business, they picked the highest-profile target they could find. The head of the Chinese Basketball Association who severed ties with the Rockets at once? A 7-foot-6-inch executive by the name of Yao Ming.

Jemele Hill: The NBA is going to have to choose

By taking on the wildly popular NBA, and especially the even more popular Rockets, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is blowing a whistle on companies (and nations) around the world. On topics that Communist Party leaders really care about—particularly Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and now Hong Kong—they’ll risk as much domestic backlash as needed to make adversaries pay. The warning registered: Morey deleted his tweet and has since expressed contrition. His forced self-criticism conjured up memories of a dunce-capped capitalist roader in a Cultural Revolution struggle session—it is important not simply that he comply, but that he is seen to comply.

Ever since China’s emergence as an economic powerhouse in the 1990s, analysts in the United States and other nations have tried to figure out the strategic implications of its heft. The question has become all the more pressing with Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a sprawling set of infrastructure projects throughout Asia, as well as burgeoning investments in Africa, Latin America, Europe—really, just about everywhere except the polar ice caps. (Yet.)

What makes China’s economic prowess different from that of its rivals is not merely its size (the economies of the U.S. and the European Union are larger—for now), but its dominance by the government itself. An American president can start a trade war with any country that annoys him, but he has no power to order General Motors or Caterpillar to cease investing in factories there. Xi, however, does. Not as a matter of law, but because for all intents and purposes, the Communist Party is the law.