The Chinese Basketball Association didn’t let the 7-foot-5 star attend the draft festivities in New York because he is still under obligation to play for the Chinese national team. And even after a week of intensive basketball diplomacy between Rockets management and Chinese officials in Shanghai, home to Yao’s club team, the Shanghai Sharks, it was still not entirely clear, right up until draft day, that Yao would be allowed to play in the NBA.

In fact, Yao has become the latest symbol for the difficult decisions developing nations must face when deciding whether to engage the larger world: Should a nation like China relinquish its resources — in this case, talented athletes — to a global power such as the United States, in exchange for a more prestigious place on the world stage? Or should China hold onto (or demand an extraordinarily high price for) its resources — even though such isolationism means losing out on the expertise and training that only developed nations can provide?

Though the final terms of the agreement are still unknown, Yao’s current team had been hoping to leverage his abilities for everything they’re worth. Earlier in May, according to The Washington Times, Li Yao Min, the Sharks assistant general manager, said that the Sharks were counting on more than financial compensation.

“We have general ideas for what the club would like to receive in compensation from the NBA club,” Li said. “We are allowed to invite two foreign players to play for the Sharks. We would like to get two bench players from an NBA club or players that the NBA club has rights to but does not use. We must also develop a relationship as a sister club to Yao’s club. They demonstrate goodwill by training our coaches and allowing our athletes to train with their coaches in the off-season.”

If the prospect (no matter how remote) of being traded from an NBA team to Shanghai is disturbing to NBA players, Yao can be only mildly more sanguine about the system Chinese officials have proposed for divvying up his salary. For starters, the Chinese government will take 50 percent of Yao’s earnings. Then his current club, the Shanghai Sharks, members of the Chinese Basketball Association, will claim a cut. Before he sees any of the remainder, Yao will have to pay Chinese taxes (and, of course, U.S. taxes).

Even signing Yao to a contract promises to be messy. According to Sharks official Li, “The negotiations are not easy. There must be nine signatures on the NBA contract: Yao Ming, his parents, the Shanghai Sharks, the Chinese agent, the Shanghai City, The National General Management, the National Basketball Management, the U.S. agent, and the NBA club. These are our rules.”

China’s rules, of course, clash with the phenomenon of open markets and borders that has come to be known as globalization. But then, China has never been afraid of striking its own course; besides being a demanding trade partner over the years, it has cheerfully disregarded international standards for human rights and intellectual property.

The Chinese do not view Yao as a free agent, in any sense of the term, but rather as a cog in the national machinery.

Though the stipulations to Yao’s contract are, from an American point of view, little short of robbery, from the Chinese perspective they are quite reasonable. After all, Yao is the product of the cradle-to-grave Chinese system. At age 13 he was plucked from his home and sent to a government sports academy; the Communist Party even takes credit for Yao’s remarkable height, calling it the result of improved nutrition. Thus, the Chinese do not view Yao as a free agent, in any sense of the term, but rather as a cog in the national machinery, a very valuable national resource.

Yet, as China begins to engage more and more with the rest of the world, it is being forced to make some hard choices, and the arena of professional basketball is unlikely to prove an exception.

To replace the cohesion that Marxism once supplied, the Communist Party in China has increasingly turned to nationalism to bind the country together. And sport has played a significant role in fostering the new Chinese patriotism. For more than a decade, China has devoted enormous state resources to becoming competitive in nearly every athletic endeavor. Its efforts have paid off. In the 2000 Summer Olympics, Chinese athletes garnered 28 gold medals, an astonishing cache, considering that as recently as 1988 China brought home only five golds. The importance China places on athletics was most obvious in Beijing’s unsuccessful campaign to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, and its successful bid for the 2008 games.

In basketball, though, China’s progress has been slow, if steady. Blessed with enormous size (China is rumored to have more than 100 7-footers in its basketball pipeline), China nevertheless took home a disappointing 10th-place finish at the Sydney Olympics. Still, prospects for the future look good, mostly because of China’s young and talented trio of front-court players, including Yao, who are collectively dubbed the Walking Wall of China (together they stand over 21 feet high).

But the national team’s weak showing in the Olympics made clear that if China is to challenge the European powers, and especially America, its players and coaches must be allowed to learn from the best in the world. As Xia Song, a Chinese basketball official told Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated in 2000, “High school and junior coaches are still training players in 1950’s ways. There are no new ideas about diet or weight training. We need exchanges with other good basketball countries.” Bruce Palmer, the American coach of the Japan All-Stars, who is familiar with the Chinese system, agreed. “If they really want to step up, they’re going to have to develop a strength-and-recovery-program, massage, diet, weights, stretching in the pool.”

But unless its players compete with the world’s best on a daily basis, even improved coaching will not be enough to catapult China to the top echelon of the sport. Yet the prospect of exporting their young stars is also deeply unsettling to bureaucrats in charge of the Chinese basketball community who fear that the process of engagement itself will undermine the tight control they have established over the sport.

Chinese soccer officials have come up with a creative solution to the problem of how to improve without ceding control. The entire Chinese junior team, 22 of China’s best teenage footballers, has moved to a 12-acre compound in Juqubita, a small town near Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they are embarked on a quest to, as national team coach Jin Zheng Min put it, ‘dominate world soccer.” Min, a former player, explained to the Globe and Mail that the train-abroad program is necessary because, “Our ideas for soccer are antiquated, and haven’t really changed since I played in the 1950’s.”

Another reason Juqubita was chosen is, of course, that there are plenty of top quality teams to spar against in soccer-rich Brazil. This setup is the best of both worlds for the Chinese. Their players can train with the assistance of some of the world’s top coaches and can compete against first-rank talent, yet the Chinese government maintains complete authority over the lives of their athletes. In fact, the players are only allowed to leave their compound for games, and many will not return home for years. Such a solution does not seem realistic, however, for the three members of the Walking Wall, who are, after all, adults.

Yao will not be the first Chinese player in America. The other members of the Walking Wall, Wang Zhizhi of the Dallas Mavericks and Menkge Bateer of the Denver Nuggets, are already on NBA rosters. And Wang’s story in particular illustrates the difficulty China faces in reconciling its conflicting goals of athletic prominence and absolute authority.

In 1999, as the star player of the People’s Liberation Army team, Wang was one of the first Chinese players to attract the attention of NBA scouts. But Chinese basketball officials were inclined to view the NBA as a predator rather than an ally. Two years later, Dallas Mavericks assistant coach Donn Nelson described to Newsweek magazine the reaction of the Chinese when they learned that Dallas had drafted him. “You could hear them thinking: “What is this NBA team doing trying to lay claim to our property.”" So at first there was no deal. Ultimately, Wang was allowed to leave, but not before the Mavericks agreed to host the coach of the Chinese national team, Wang Fei, for a full season. And like Yao, Wang’s contract requires him to return to China for national team obligations, while China’s army reserves the right to recall him at any time.

This is, of course, a classic globalization story. A developing nation that is rich in resources (gifted but raw athletes) and poor in technical expertise (coaching and weight training) must choose whether to remain isolated and subsequently lag behind in competitiveness. On the other hand, the developing country can elect to engage the larger world, but risk losing control of those resources. By allowing Wang — and now Yao — to leave, but only under stringent conditions, the Chinese appear to be trying to split the difference.

Predictably, perhaps, they have pleased no one. For their part, the Dallas Mavericks have reacted like other first-world corporations have when faced with unreasonable (from their perspective) demands coming from jealous governments trying to protect their investments. Faced with the bureaucratic headaches inherent in doing business in China, Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Mavericks, described the process to The Sporting News as ‘more and more complicated by the day,” and said that in retrospect, it was not worth the trouble it took to acquire Wang. Cuban’s attitude, if adopted by other NBA officials, will, of course, handicap the Chinese in their effort to improve at the sport, just as too much red tape keeps foreign investment out of emerging markets.

And even with the restrictions written into Wang’s contract, the Chinese are finding it impossible to manage him. As of mid-June, Wang had missed two deadlines set by the Chinese Basketball Association to report for training. His absence was a major factor in China’s humiliating defeat to New Zealand earlier this year. “We are very concerned about Wang,” a Chinese National Team executive said in June, according to USA Today. “He acts as if he can do as he wants. But if he does, there may not be any other players going [to the NBA].”

Wang’s defiance fueled speculation that he may defect to the United States, in which case he would not be eligible to play in this summer’s World Championships in Indianapolis. Nor would China continue to reap a financial return on its investment in Wang. After disappearing for a period of several weeks, during which neither the Mavericks nor the Chinese knew his whereabouts, Wang emerged on June 25 in Los Angeles. He explained his absence from the Chinese team to the Fort Worth Star Telegram: “They wanted me to come back, but it was important for me to stay here to improve my basketball skills,” Wang said through an interpreter. “I’m doing very well here, and what I’m working on now is what the coaches what me to work on, and that’s rebounding and playing defense.”

While it’s impossible to know Wang’s exact motives, the popular R. Kelly tune he sang one night last year, soon after his arrival in America, may be revealing: “I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky,” the graceful 7-footer crooned, according to Newsweek, as he reclined in his coach’s hot tub.

In any case, it’s probably a safe guess that Wang’s defiance is in part motivated by the very constraints designed to keep him loyal. In other words, if China wishes to prevent its Walking Wall from, well, walking, the government may have to allow the players freedom to decide their own futures. This is a familiar pattern in the globalization era, where nation-states increasingly find it difficult to control talented individuals (and large corporations) because of market forces that operate with little respect for traditional borders.

Not that we need to feel sorry for the oligarchs who run China. After all, this is the same Communist party responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre and the rape of Tibet. Still, the emerging pool of Chinese basketball players has put the Chinese government in a difficult position — one achingly familiar to developing nations facing the pressures of globalization — though usually the dilemma has more to do with mining resources than scouting rebounders.

Ultimately, the Chinese may be forced to either abandon their goal of competing as equals on the global basketball stage, or relinquish the totalitarian control they wield over their athletes. With its recent admission to the World Trade Organization, China is at a crossroads. Those eager to learn what path the world’s most populous nation will take might do well to pay attention to the careers of Yao and Wang.