Golf loses its gloss for China’s privileged elite

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/29/china-golf-course-crackdown-elite-luxury

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An hour’s drive north of downtown Shanghai, on the island of Chongming, lies a little paradise. Lan Hai International Golf Club boasts two 18-hole courses. But the place is not strictly for golfers. It’s a preserve of those who have profited the most from China’s economic boom.

Any given Saturday morning, you’ll find the elite gliding from hole to hole in their electric golf carts, the players accompanied by two caddies alert to their every command and quick to advise on how to play the course. The game invariably winds up at the clubhouse, its entrance flanked by two superb Italian fountains.

For these golfers, the drive from Shanghai is no obstacle; they come and go in powerful sedans. Some even own one of the Tuscan-style villas that rim the links. “It’s a lifestyle,” says the club’s manager, Zhang Hongze. He’s convinced Chongming will soon become what Long Island is to New York. His reception room boasts a fireplace right out of a French chateau.

This lifestyle, however, is now being targeted by China’s President Xi Jinping and his powerful ally Wang Qishan, the country’s anti-corruption boss. Mao Zedong once denounced golf as a bourgeois pastime, and since Xi took office in 2012, the president has led a campaign against excesses by state officials and their friends in business. To dodge the purge, many now avoid displays of conspicuous consumption, even if they got rich the legal way and even if to them golf is merely a means to network with the powerful.

Communist party leaders want to show they’re still close to the common people, and if there’s one glaring symbol of wealth in China, it’s golf. Unlike the US, Japan and Korea, where golf is a sport of the leisured middle class, in China high membership fees, equipment costs and associated expenditures make it very much a privilege of the rich.

Inevitably, the political storm now sweeping China has hit the golf courses of the nation and the players who use them.

In April, five months after submitting to an official government inspection, China Southern Airlines – Asia’s largest carrier by fleet size and passengers carried – announced it would no longer offer free golf holidays to its most loyal customers. And last December, the province of Guangdong ordered its officials to steer clear of the fairways, too.

The sport is getting a bad reputation in other ways. To be maintained properly, golf courses have to be watered regularly – this, at a time when northern China is suffering from chronic water shortages. And building new ones means expropriating farmland, often under highly dubious circumstances – this at a time when the most heavily populated country on the planet strives daily to maintain enough arable land to feed its people.

In March, China’s national development and reform commission, the state’s central planning office, announced the closure of 66 golf clubs – about one out of every 10 in the country, according to American journalist Dan Washburn, author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream .

That’s a rough estimate, he admits: “Nobody knows the exact number of golf clubs in China – it’s somewhere between 600 and 1,000.” The Chinese government ordered a stop to new construction in 2004, but the number of clubs has tripled since then in other guises, lumped in with acceptable projects such as protected nature reserves.

What makes it attractive to the nouveau riche is that feeling of belonging to a select group, far from the madding crowd

Golf not only draws the keen eye of many a local politician, but the opening of a new club can bring prestige to the commune that runs it. Municipalities compete with each other to attract investors, and there’s a strong financial incentive: promoters pay high prices for land expropriated by local governments, who have owned it since Mao collectivised farms in the 1950s.

As a result, the People’s Republic is now home to the two biggest golf clubs in the world: Mission Hills Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, which features seven 18-hole resort and championship courses, and Mission Hills Haikou, still under construction on the tropical island of Hainan and which will have 22 golf courses on offer.

New clubs have opened in even more exotic locations: for example, in Hunan province’s Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, whose mountains inspired the ones seen in the sci-fi movie Avatar.

At Lan Hai, China’s anti-corruption campaign is a sensitive subject. The club opened in June 2012, just before Xi came to power.

“For two or three years now, our sport has attracted a great deal of attention,” club manager Zhang acknowledges, trying to accentuate the positive. “If there have been illegal practices and people have been punished, that’s progress.” But officials who once made a habit of playing 18 holes at Lan Hai now keep a low profile.

The way things are in China these days, if golf is to have a future it must become more democratic. Trouble is, what makes it attractive to the nouveau riche is that very feeling of belonging to a select group, far from the madding crowd. “A lot of people pick up golf precisely because they want to become a member of an exclusive club,” says Washburn.

With its cigar lounge, whisky bar and wine cellar stocked with Château Figeac and Château Lafite Rothschild, everything about Lan Hai golf club is a reminder that this is a place reserved for the privileged few. Nevertheless, Zhang hopes the middle classes will see golf as a way to get out of the city and breathe the fresh country air. “To really last,” says the manager, seated on a Chesterfield sofa that’s really ever so British, “this sport must become more popular.”

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde