In a commentary, James M Dorsey, a senior fellow at NTU’s RSIS, wrote about how the responses of sports associations to denunciations of repression in China’s troubled north-western province of Xinjiang and support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by soccer celebrity Mesut Özil, Houston Rockets basketball general manager Darryl Morey, and rugby superstar Sonny Bill Williams, highlight the willingness of those associations to sacrifice their values for commercial gain in their dealings with autocratic nations.