"President Xi Jinping's crackdown on vice and corruption in China has gone after drugs, gambling, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and overflowing banquet tables. Now it has turned to a less obvious target: golf.
In a flurry of recent reports, state-run news outlets have depicted the sport as yet another temptation
that has led Communist Party officials astray. A top official at the
Commerce Ministry is under investigation on suspicion of allowing an
unidentified company to pay his golf expenses. The government has shut
down dozens of courses across the country built in violation of a ban
intended to protect China's limited supplies of water and arable land.
And in the southern province of Guangdong, home to the world’s largest golf facility, the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club,
party officials have been forbidden to golf during work hours “to
prevent unclean behavior and disciplinary or illegal conduct.”
The
provincial anticorruption agency has set up a hotline for reporting
civil servants who violate nine specific regulations, including
prohibitions on betting on golf, playing with people connected to one’s
job, traveling on golf-related junkets or holding positions on the
boards of golf clubs.
“Like
fine liquor and tobacco, fancy cars and mansions, golf is a public
relations tool that businessmen use to hook officials,” the newspaper of
the party’s antigraft agency declared on April 9. “The golf course is gradually changing into a muddy field where they trade money for power.”
Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,”
said the crackdown was not surprising given the game’s reputation in
China as a capitalist pastime and the extent of Mr. Xi’s prolonged campaign against corruption, which has toppled senior party and military leaders.
“This is Xi Jinping’s
China, and it’s clear he’s intent on making his mark,” Mr. Washburn
said.
“Everyone’s a potential target in this ongoing crackdown on
corruption, and golf is a particularly easy and obvious one.”
Golf
has faced harsh suppression in China before. When the Communist Party
came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong condemned the game as a “sport for
millionaires,” and courses that had been built for foreigners were
turned into public parks, zoos and communal farms.
The
sport went dormant for three decades before China’s first course since
the revolution opened in Guangdong in 1984. Now, as many as one million
people play the game in China. Though it is popular among members of the
wealthy elite — including party bureaucrats, apparently — some of
China’s earliest professional golfers are former workers and farmers who
stumbled onto the game.
Huang
Wenyi, a onetime construction worker who is now the world’s
1,189th-ranked player, thrilled Chinese fans Thursday after he led at
the end of the first day of the Shenzhen International, a European
Tour-sanctioned event in the southern Chinese city. (He had fallen to
13th place by the end of play Saturday.)
Chinese
players in their teens and even younger, drilled by parents and coaches
with a resolution that rivals that of state-run sports schools, are
expected to be strongly represented among the world’s top players in
coming decades.
The
national government banned the construction of new courses in 2004,
citing concern over the environmental impact of unrestrained
development. But even that did not stop the game’s rise. In defiance of
the ban, the number of courses in China has grown more than threefold since then, to more than 600 today, according to industry estimates.
Courses
were often built as part of luxury housing developments to increase
land values and attract rich property investors. Local governments,
which depend on land sales for a large share of their revenues, looked
the other way as developers described them as “leisure” facilities.
After
years of warnings, the National Development and Reform Commission said
on March 30 that 66 illegally constructed golf courses in Beijing,
Shanghai, Tianjin and 20 provinces had been closed — and indicated that its investigation was continuing.
The next day, anticorruption investigators at the Ministry of Commerce announced that they had opened an inquiry
into Wang Shenyang, director general of the ministry’s Department of
Outward Investment and Economic Cooperation, on suspicion of
participating in activities sponsored by an unidentified company. Golf was the only activity specified.
The Legal Weekly, run by the Ministry of Justice, chimed in by publishing a list of 15 party officials
who have been punished in the last decade for golf-related
transgressions. It included Sun Guoqing, head of the Ministry of
Transportation’s planning department, who was suspected of using public
funds to pay for rounds, and Han Jiang, a district official in Shenzhen,
who was convicted of receiving nearly $1 million in bribes, the largest
single portion of which was in the form of a membership to the Mission
Hills Golf Club.
“Golf,
because of its high cost and unique glamour, has been called the
‘aristocrats’ game,’ ” the newspaper said. “But an awkward truth is that
because of ‘rotten’ golf, some officials have been punished or even
jailed.”
An
art dealer in Beijing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss illicit activity, said that many insider deals were made over
rounds of golf. “When we play golf, we invite officials, too,” he said.
“This is not something ordinary people can afford.”
Some
golfers have complained about the criticism of their sport, arguing
that there is nothing inherently corrupt about it. “Around the world so
many officials and even presidents play golf. Why is it that in one
certain country that when an official plays golf, he’s corrupt?” Lin
Xiang, a golf coach in Shanghai, wrote on Sina Weibo, the popular social
media platform.
If
time on the links is almost required of politicians in the United
States, Chinese leaders zealously avoid the game. The one top-level
official known to have regularly played golf, Zhao Ziyang, was deposed
as party chief by hard-liners during the 1989 Tiananmen protests and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for his support of the student-led demonstrations.
Uncertainty
about the future of the sport has led to a drastic slowdown in course
construction. “It’s all drying up,” said Les Watts, a Hong Kong-based
course designer. After two decades of work on courses in mainland China,
he says he is planning to soon return to his native Australia.
Still,
Chinese golfers are not ready to abandon their new passion. “I’m still
playing,” said a 60-year-old golfer in Beijing who would only give his
surname, Zhang. “It’s already in the next Olympic Games, so the state
will definitely support it.”
Mr.
Zhang sat with his shoes off, checking stocks on a small computer
before a round at his club. “If ordinary people use our own money to
play,” he said, “the government never says you can’t do it.”
Mr.
Washburn, the author, said golf would continue to be buffeted by the
contradictions of a country that has embraced market forces even as it
continues to describe itself as socialist.
“There
are alternate realities in China,” he said. “One day you’ll read
headlines about a war on golf, and the next you’ll hear about China’s
future Olympic golf stars.”"
"Vanessa Piao contributed research from Beijing."
"A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2015, on page A8 of the New York edition"....
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