In summer 2002, Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball player from Shanghai, was drafted by the Houston Rockets as the overall first-pick. His advent to the NBA quickly brought about a phenomenal impact, both economically and culturally. He was not only voted by the fans to the All-Star game and replaced Shaquille O'Neal as one of the starting five in the Western Conference team, but also boosted the ticket sales of the Rockets' game to an increasing Asian American spectatorship. Instantly, he is more than the 'little giant' from China, but the great 'yellow hope' for Asian Pacific Americans — representing the 'Chinese' and the Chinese market in the age of globalization. Considering entertainment sports as a distinct place for transnational labour and commodity transactions, this paper takes Yao and his proliferating cultural economic impact as an occasion to analyse and critique the China Global as a national-capitalist fantasy that is materialized at the expense of 'stylized' bodies. Acknowledging, although not endorsing, Julianne Malveaux's crude metaphor of basketball plantation, this paper suggests that Yao articulates a different mode of global capitalism than that represented by Michael Jordan in the 1990s. This mode of global capitalism is not so much about the labour of conquest as epitomized by black athletes, but about the attraction of the market and the availability of labour supply as inscribed in the history of Chinese immigration. The American dream of Yao, ultimately, is the capitalist and nationalist desire for 'bigness'.