The marketing wizards at the National Basketball Association (NBA) like to talk about China as basketball’s “final frontier.” But the Middle Kingdom’s fascination with hoops began long before an affable 7-foot, 6-inch giant named Yao Ming debuted with the NBA’s Houston Rockets in 2002. China may not have invented the game, as some Chinese sports historians claim, pointing to the ancient pastime of shouju, a form of Han dynasty handball. But basketball did, in fact, land in China before it arrived in Houston, and only a few years after an eccentric Canadian named James Naismith invented the game in 1891.

From the beginning, basketball was destined to be a global sport—and China its ultimate conquest—for one serendipitous reason: Doc Naismith created the game at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) international training center in Springfield, Massachusetts, a place where young missionaries imbibed a vision of “muscular Christianity” before heading off to redeem the world. China was the biggest emerging market for souls to be saved, an empire of 400 million people in the waning years of the Qing dynasty. When YMCA missionaries arrived in the city of Tianjin in the 1890s carrying “The Thirteen Rules of Basketball,” along with their Bibles, they believed that salvation would come through God and hoops, though not necessarily in that order.

More than a century later, another wave of Western evangelists has descended on the Middle Kingdom, preaching a glitzier gospel of globalization. Instead of Bibles and “The Thirteen Rules of Basketball,” the foreigners who began trickling into China in the 1990s carried different symbols of their faith: the Nike swoosh, the NBA logo, highlight films of a miracle man named Michael Jordan—all played to the hip-hop soundtrack of global youth culture. China, 1.3 billion strong, had finally emerged from decades...