Chinese sports icon Yao Ming hated basketball as a child, and only took up the sport due to a sense of obligation to his parents and his country.
Operation Yao Ming, a new book by American author Brook Larmer, tells how even the star's birth was devised by the Communist Party, which encouraged his tall, athletic parents to get together.
Chinese sports officials were intent on creating athletes who could bring glory to their resurgent motherland, explained Larmer, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Shanghai.
Larmer, who was in Hong Kong this week, said the government's plans succeeded, producing two of the tallest players ever to grace a basketball court - Yao (seven-foot-six) and Wang Zhizhi (seven-foot-one).
But officials did not plan for foreigners to capitalise on their national treasures. In 1999, giant American sports company Nike and the NBA set their sights on the pair, hoping to tap into a market of 1.3 billion people.
'It became a tug-of-war between the east and west,' said Larmer, who gave up his job for two years to research the story full-time.
'On one side was the Chinese sports system, which had developed them to bring glory to China, and on the other side were the commercial forces.'