Why did China react so strongly to Daryl Morey’s tweet and the NBA?

October 4 tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey

A couple of weeks ago I suspected that China was going to suffer from the Streisand effect, when it got so uptight about a tweet by an NBA official, the image above.
Beijing-based Wang Xiangwei considers this and also another theory, that the hugely negative reaction was more from ordinary Chinese, who’ve been pumped up with jingoistic nationalism by Xi Jinping’s crudely robust and in-your-face policies.  He makes a good case. (Which, by the way, is critical of Xi Jinping).

Players in social media in China include the “fifty cent gang” (五毛, wu mao, aka the “5M"), meaning those who get paid five mao, or fifty Chinese cents, for every pro-government internet post, and now the Little Pinks (小粉红, xiao fenhong), who do it not for money, but for patriotism, who "take it upon themselves as true patriots to trawl the internet and attack anyone or any company displaying or voicing any slight against the country, particularly targeting foreigners or Chinese nationals in foreign countries.”

Hence a huge kerfuffle over the tweet of an NBA official. Not necessarily all Beijing-directed, in other words.

Wang also talks of China’s continuing sensitivity to what they call the “hundred years humiliation”, the carve up of China after the Opium Wars.  I can attest to that. It’s alive in minds. And no wonder.  At one time, Queen Victoria was the largest drug dealer in the world, who had made up to 90% of China’s young men addicts to the opium Britain grew in its Indian colony and shipped into China to pay for the silk and tea it bought. The China Opium trade was 25% of Britain’s budget. 
[James Bradley’s China Mirage is good on this. He’s also good on The Imperial Cruise, from 24’00” for the China opium stuff. (Bradley wrote Flags of our Fathers, which was made into a hit Clint Eastwood movie)]

Comments on Wang’s essay are divided.  One good one, I thought, as I’ve written about how good the SCMP is, gets lots of upticks:

The fact that this writer is based in BJ, written an anti China opinion piece, for an anti China medium SCMP, that is owned by a Chinese company, is perhaps unknown by many people and certainly speaks volumes about how far the Chinese government has progressed.