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A book by an experienced writer claims it was no accident Yao Ming became a basketball player; that the powers that be in China steadily pushed him and held him to that pursuit.

Operation Yao Ming, published by Penguin Group and written by Brook Larmer, a former Newsweek and Christian Science Monitor journalist, says that Chinese officials spent many years anticipating Yao Ming's birth, literally waiting for him to exist because of who his parents were. And from the moment he was born, the powers that be made sure he'd be big like his parents, and made him become a basketball player.

The book claims that Yao Ming's parents were forced to become basketball players because of their size, and they were strongly "encouraged" to marry each other so that their children would be big like they were.

Operation Yao Ming says that the parents didn't want Yao involved, but they couldn't really prevent it. Yao was forced to play basketball his entire life, given growth supplements to make him even bigger than he already was for his age, and raised to become a basketball player whether he liked it or not.

And apparently he didn't like it at all. Larmer writes that Yao wasn't good at basketball for much of his youth, hated playing it, but was made to keep going.

The book also discusses more about Yao's parents, the experiences another Chinese basketball player (Wang Zhizhi) went through, the process of getting Yao out of professional Chinese basketball so the NBA could draft him, various other basketball and political-related business dealings, and much more.