Monday’s edition of the People’s Daily included a letter in the sports section that appeared to have been written by American basketball star Lebron James. The league was taken off Chinese broadcasts in 2019 after then-general-manager of the Houston Rockets Daryl Morey expressed support for protesters in Hong Kong. But American companies have been ceding slices of that pie to up-and-coming Chinese rivals. The return of basketball royalty to China is intended to reverse that trend. “The ZheBA might not understand basketball, but it understands Zhejiang”, one user wrote on the social platform RedNote, in a post that received thousands of likes.