Golf has had a rough ride in China over the last couple of years. The game, which flourished among the wealthy elite during the boom times of the noughties, has since suffered the brunt of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on all things unsavoury. Thrown together with drugs, gambling, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and conspicuous consumption, golf has been portrayed as a vice, a temptation that leads Communist Party officials astray. This may well be true but in all my years of crossing the border with the sole purpose of teeing it up, the only thing that I remember going astray was my ball. I was clearly playing with the wrong people. Things reached a head last year when the party banned all 88 million of its members from joining golf clubs.
At the time, the newspaper of the party’s anti-graft agency opined: “Like fine liquor or tobacco, fancy cars and mansions, golf is a public relations tool that businessmen use to hook officials.” Beijing, it should be said, had never been golf’s biggest fan. Although there are rumours that Xi himself used to enjoy the occasional game before he reached the top job, the central government has had a moratorium on the construction of new courses in the country since 2004, precisely two decades after the completion of its first – the Arnold Palmer-designed Chung Shan Hot Spring in nearby Zhongshan. The moratorium was largely ignored by all and sundry and courses sprang up all over the place. From the deserts of Xinjiang to the bays of Hainan, few provinces were left untouched by a (well-heeled) hacker’s divot and subsequent pitch mark.
Golf was – and still is – an enigma on the mainland: a sport that the political elite couldn’t be seen to publicly endorse too enthusiastically; but one which maintains a considerable following amongst those entrepreneurs who, likely, relied on the very same political elite to help pave their way to vast riches. You can get a lot of business done during five hours on a course followed up by a decent post-round session at the 19th.
