Last month one of China’s biggest superstars took a surprising stand: Yao Ming, the seven-foot-six Houston Rocket and tallest member of the NBA, publicly announced he is swearing off shark’s fin soup. To most Americans, this is like promising you’ll never eat lemur feet. But in China, it is a bold stand against an age-old tradition.

Shark’s fin is an expensive delicacy there, one renowned as a national treasure for its exquisite taste. Which, for the record, is flavorless. Shark’s fin actually adds no flavor to the soup, just a rubbery texture – it could as easily be Firestone tire soup. But what it lacks in any semblance of taste, it more than compensates with symbolic wealth and prestige. Chinese are so smitten with shark’s fin soup that to fail to order it at a business dinner will cause you to lose face. (Here in America, we prefer more sensible signs of wealth and prestige, such as wearing endangered animals as hats, driving stretch Hummers with swimming pools in the back, and carving up hundred dollar bills to decorate our nails.)

In China, it is virtually unheard of for celebrities to grandstand on political or moral issues à la Bono. There is no Chinese character for “Bono.” (Actually, there might be, but, you know, there probably isn’t.) In the past, Chinese public figures have paid dearly for taking unpopular stands.

[W]hen Zhao Wei, a popular singer, donned a Japanese military flag for a fashion shoot… her career began to fizzle. At a concert, she was tackled by a construction worker who said his grandparents had been killed during the war. He smeared her face with feces.

So, yeah – they get a little testy over there on national pride issues. Despite the risk, Yao Ming is not the first celebrity to speak out on shark’s fin soup. It has been shunned by Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee and film star Tony Leung. Croc hunter Steve Irwin was known for walking out of Chinese restaurants if he saw shark’s fin soup on the menu (you gotta miss that guy…)

“Putting our ecosystem in great peril is certainly not a part of Chinese culture that I know,” Mr. Yao said in an e-mail message Friday afternoon, from Guangzhou, where he was preparing for a game. “How do you maintain this so-called tradition when one day there is no shark to be finned?”

Ming also appears in a new endangered wildlife PSA, in which he leaps past an elephant that apparently wandered out onto a basketball court and with vivid, Gatorade-commercial close-up action Ming stops a poacher’s bullet with his hand. Then he announces to the camera, “When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

While this image may sound a bit silly, it’s much better than the original version featuring Ang Lee: An elephant walks by while Lee is filming two strapping young Hollywood stars simulating gay sex, at which point Lee pivots in his director’s chair and grabs a nearby P.A., swinging him like a baseball bat and deflecting the bullet, saving the elephant. Then he declares to the camera, “I wish I knew how to quit you, shark’s fin soup.”

Yao Ming Endangered Wildlife PSA

Yao Ming Swears Off Shark's Fin Soup (USA Today)

Waiter, There’s a Celebrity in My Shark Fin Soup (NYT, reg. req.)