The latest: China has been twisting the NBA's arm over a single pro-Hong Kong tweet from Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey.

• The threat of losing access to the massive, lucrative Chinese market has pushed the NBA, Morey and even basketball superstar LeBron James to bend to the Chinese Communist Party. And China went as far as to ask the NBA to fire Morey, Commissioner Adam Silver said.

The big picture: It's not just China. American companies have long ignored attacks against democratic values in authoritarian countries that are willing to shell out for their products or services.

The American intelligence community acknowledges that the Kremlin interfered in an American presidential election and committed a nerve agent attack on British soil. But American corporations still maintain strong ties to the regime, even though the U.S. has had sanctions in place against Russia since 2014.

• Companies like Boeing, Ford, and McDonalds all consider Russia a big growth market, per Reuters.
• McKinsey, along with Paul Manafort, was paid to clean up the image of the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, who decried the West and was convicted of financial fraud, reports the New York Times.
• “They don’t want to alienate regimes, or they would lose business," David J. Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state, told the Times.

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by the Saudi royal family, but it's business as usual between U.S. companies and the Saudi government.

• The Saudis are the biggest customers for American weapons and the biggest source of capital for Silicon Valley startups.
• Wall Street is still vying for the IPO of Saudi oil giant Aramco — a deal that could be worth up to $2 trillion.

But no country has pushed American people and companies around like China.

"China is in a different category from anything else — and maybe anything else in world history — because there's never been such a fiercely authoritarian regime that had such overawing market power," says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "We're effectively losing our 1st Amendment rights because of an external power."

• U.S. firms are not just doing business with China despite its human rights abuses — they're policing speech and expression to bend to Beijing's will.
• The list is almost endless. The American companies who have apologized to China or censored themselves to please the Chinese Communist Party include Apple, Marriott, the Gap, all three big airlines, shoemaker Vans, gaming company Activision Blizzard, and the NBA.

What to watch: China is only getting richer and stronger. Says Diamond, "We're just in the early stages of this."

"The State Department and the White House and Congress are all saying it's not just Huawei, but all Chinese companies are part of China's military-civil fusion complex and are a national security threat."

Context: In a September speech, Christopher Ford, an assistant secretary at the State Department, warned not just of Huawei — the telecom giant sanctioned by the administration in May — but also "its siblings."

• "This narrative is creating a lot more pressure on Chinese companies," Sacks says.
• While Huawei has grabbed most of the recent headlines, attention is now turning to other Chinese firms, like ByteDance, which runs the wildly popular TikTok video app.

Driving the news: The NBA's fallout with China over a general manager's tweet regarding the Hong Kong protests has raised concerns about the Chinese Communist Party's ability to enforce censorship on U.S. soil.

Activision Blizzard, an American gaming company that counts the Chinese tech giant Tencent as an investor, was criticized for suspending a Hong Kong-based gamer who supported the protest movement.

Moderators at TikTok — the short-form video-sharing app that is habit-forming among U.S. kids — are instructed to censor videos that mention topics that bother the Chinese Communist Party, including Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence, according to leaked documents viewed by the Guardian.

• The Guardian report prompted Sen. Marco Rubio to call for an investigation of the app.
• TikTok announced Tuesday it had hired two former congressmen and was convening a panel of outside experts to review its content moderation policies.

Chinese firms are also prompting concerns about data privacy.

• Experts say TikTok could become China's next big weapon in the race for personal data. "Think about all the data that TikTok has on American teenagers," says Sacks.
• In May, the U.S. government pushed China's Kunlun to sell off the American dating app Grindr over similar worries about data privacy.

All the while, Washington's rhetoric and policies have grown more hawkish.

• Congress has strengthened CFIUS, the Treasury Department's committee for reviewing foreign investments in the U.S.
• "We understand that the program is staffing up in ways that suggest increased scrutiny is the new norm for the foreseeable future," says Doug Barry of the U.S.-China Business Council.

But, but, but: A heavy-handed approach to Chinese firms has a host of consequences.

• "No one should take national security lightly, but the real risk here is government overreach," Barry says.
• The government risks making U.S. companies less competitive in the international market by prohibiting them from selling products to Chinese companies — and pushing those companies to buy the same goods from Japan or South Korea, Barry says.
• A true decoupling that gives the U.S. no visibility into technological advancement in China could be "really dangerous," says Sacks.
• "Gene-editing? AI? These are technologies that are going to fundamentally change society, and if China and the U.S. go down completely different paths here, there could be dire consequences for humanity," says Sacks.

Go deeper: How Huawei is weathering U.S. sanctions

Driving the news: Led by Amazon, several big American retailers are raising their wages to around $15 an hour. But stores are slashing workers' hours, and robots are supplanting people.

• "Close to 30% of America's ... retail workers worked fewer than 35 hours a week last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, 17% of workers work below 35 hours a week," reports CNN's Nathaniel Meyersohn.
• Meyersohn spoke with current and former Target employees who said they struggled to pay rent or buy food due to shrinking workweeks.

Some jobs that have existed for decades — like taking inventory or cleaning aisles — are being automated away.

• In April, Walmart added nearly 4,000 robots that can mop floors, unload trucks and scan shelves.

And retailers are adding part-time and temporary workers to staff the holiday rush as they cut hours for full-time employees.

• Close to 40% of Walmart's workforce are part-timers, per CNN.
• Target has announced plans to hire 130,000 temps for the holiday season.

The bottom line: "It's a much slower process to eliminate people than you might think," says J.P. Gownder, an expert on automation at Forrester. But in retail, "in the longer term and at scale, the economics favor automation."

Go deeper: The inexplicable decline in retail sales growth