This past year, however, things changed dramatically. Just wait and see how many golf courses get built then, people would say.
And at the end of the year, you could always count on two things: a dramatic increase in the number of golf courses in China, and rumors that the Chinese government was about to legitimize and regulate the industry. One massive project of note was known as "ecological restoration." There didn't seem to be too many rules in all of this, but one was especially important: When building a golf course in China, don't call it a golf course. While it's been illegal to build new golf courses in China since at least 2004, no other country has built more of them over the past decade - not even close.īeijing would say new construction is banned, while at the same time local governments would line their pockets with the proceeds from the boom.
Over the past decade, however, not much seemed like it could get in the way of golf's meteoric growth in China. Related: How California golf courses are surviving the drought There's even a public hotline for reporting suspected golf violations.
The forbidden game golf and the chinese dream crack#
In Guangdong province, the birthplace of golf in modern China, an investigative team has been formed to crack down on officials who took part in any of nine golf-related activities. At worst, they are thought to be totally corrupt. At best, the public would view these backswinging bureaucrats as out of touch. That small sliver should not include anyone living off the salary of a public official, but it often has over the years. In a nation of 700 million peasant farmers, only a small sliver of the population can afford to play the game. Golf also remains prohibitively expensive in China (this was one thing about which Mao was right) and it has earned a reputation as a self-indulgent, elitist pursuit. China is home to 20% of the world's population, yet just 7% of its fresh water and 9% of its arable land, one-fifth of which is polluted. The construction and maintenance of golf courses is particularly resource intensive. Mao Zedong banned it, denouncing golf as the "sport for millionaires." Even after China opened up and golf re-emerged in the mid-1980s, largely as a way to attract foreign investment, the sport was saddled with serious image problems. If there is a better example of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, as these vast unmistakable tracts spread across the country, I haven’t noticed it.As I wrote in my book on the topic, China has long had a complicated relationship with golf.
But hundreds have been built, saving the bacon of the world’s leading designers as the American market has collapsed. I know no narrative that surpasses The Forbidden Game in this regard.īuilding golf courses has been illegal for many years in China, except for a very recent ruling that permits them on Hainan island alone. But the other book is on a wholly different matter: the details and extent of local and high-level Chinese corruption – ‘A China thing’, or ‘That’s China’, as one of Dan Washburn’s main subjects repeats, as if to excuse as well as explain. One is about the intricacies and arcana of golf – irons, niblicks, drivers, pars, cuts, and so on.
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