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Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing

by Jim Yardley

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Basketball as a Lens on Modern China

$17.86 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Basketball as a Lens on Modern China

Jim Yardley centers this nonfiction account on the Shanxi Brave Dragons, a struggling professional team that brings in former NBA coach Bob Weiss to introduce an American approach to the game. The season’s playoff ambitions unfold alongside conflicts over authority, management, and what “advanced basketball culture” can mean in a different national and professional context. Following the team on the road, the book uses the practical pressures of coaching and competition to examine a larger collision between imported methods and local control in modern China.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Basketball fans interested in professional leagues beyond the NBA
  • Readers of sports nonfiction with a cross-cultural focus
  • Those interested in contemporary China through everyday institutions

Themes

BasketballCross-cultural exchangeCoaching and leadershipModern ChinaInstitutional control

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

From the former New York Times Beijing bureau chief comes a closely observed story of a struggling Chinese basketball team and its quixotic, often comical attempt to make the playoffs by copying the American stars of the NBA.

When the worst professional basketball team in China, the Shanxi Brave Dragons, hired former NBA coach Bob Weiss to improve its fortunes, the team's owner, Boss Wang, promised that Weiss would be allowed to Americanize his players by teaching them "advanced basketball culture." That promise would be broken from the moment Weiss landed in China. As we follow this team of colorful oddballs on a fascinating road trip through modern China, we see Weiss learn firsthand what so many other foreigners there have discovered: that changing China happens only when and how China wants to be changed.

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