It turns out that when they say “Just do it,” the “it” refers to subservience to Chinese totalitarianism.

We’ve spent a lot of time hollering at the sports world’s many woke frauds this week for their willingness to trade freedom of conscience for Chinese blood money, but none is more fraudulent than Nike. This is, of course, the company that made Colin Kaepernick the centerpiece of an ad campaign whose tagline was — wait for it — “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Everything except … yuans, did they mean?

A Twitter pal suggests a new slogan: “Believe in money. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Managers at five Nike stores in Beijing and Shanghai told Reuters during visits on Thursday they had been told in recent days via a memo from management that all Rockets merchandise had to be removed. Reuters was unable to view the memo…

Three Nike stores in Shenzhen also kept Rockets merchandise off the shelves, as well as NBA products in general, staff told Reuters by phone. Three Nike stores in Chengdu, a bustling inland city in southwest China, also removed Rockets products…

“Rockets products were hot before and when you stepped into the store, it was full of red. Now, it is mostly yellow and blue,” the colors of the Golden State Warriors, said a manager at the Shanghai Playzone, who, like the NBA store employee, declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

This can only end now with Kaepernick himself saying something about how the Uighur issue is “more complicated” than people think. Not until every last social-justice warrior has been exposed as a moneygrubbing bootlicker will the NBA’s China tornado dissipate.

Speaking of which, as enjoyable as it is to see most of these phonies revealed for who they really are, in a few cases it hurts. This one hurts:

“They have billions of dollars at stake,” [Charles] Barkley says. “It’s a business decision. I understand the NBA. The players and the owners both got billions of dollars at stake.”

As for those who don’t get it … he didn’t hold back on ripping them, by calling them “idiots and jackasses and fools.”

“The NBA makes billions of dollars in China and that goes to the owners and the players,” Barkley added. “So, it’s a business decision, and I totally understand it.”

Of all the likable bigmouthed personalities in sports, Barkley’s the last whom I would have guessed would resort to China cuckery. He’s too human and fundamentally American not to recoil at the idea of letting ChiCom money dictate what he, you, and I say about politics, particularly when what we’re being asked not to say is that Hong Kongers deserve human rights.

But no, in the end, Sir Charles only cares about money too. Maybe he’s a little too fundamentally American. Thus does the country’s long love affair with Charles Barkley end tragically.

Here he is commenting on the Dan Patrick Show this morning. Needless to say, NBA players don’t need Barkley to remind them to protect their, and the league’s, bottom lines. In case it wasn’t clear enough this week that they had better shut their mouths going forward if they want the yuans to keep flowing, their agents are reportedly urging them to withhold comment on all things China when asked. Thus do some of the most aggressive capitalists in the American imagination, the flashy sharks nailing down nine-figure contracts for the likes of LeBron and Steph Curry, end up effectively deputized as capos for China’s communist regime.