Golf in the Year of the Rat

The pollution is bad. It hurts your eyes and scorches your throat. The day looks like when you turn the color down on the TV and turn the brightness way up. The course is thronged by cranes, power lines, cell towers, floodlight towers for a nearby soccer stadium, giant nets of a nearby driving range and monolithic apartment buildings. The barren flatlands of Beijing are not ideally suited to golf -- the country's best courses are 1,300 miles away, in Kunming, where the climate and topography are better. But we have a good game. Some work is being done on the back nine, so we play the front nine twice, missing out on the 153-yard finishing hole, whose island green sits right in front of the clubhouse. Having so many caddies is like renting your own gallery. There is plenty of applause and cries of "Hao qiu," and the English equivalent: "Good shot."

All of China's golf courses seem to want to be the most expensive. (The leader is Sheshan Golf Club in Shanghai with an initiation fee of $240,000.) They all want to employ the most staff, and offer the most excessive, over-the-top service. Mission Hills in Shenzhen (membership: $200,000), about an hour from Hong Kong, has 12 golf courses, two hotels, three giant clubhouses -- one claims to be the world's biggest, at 680,000 square feet -- four spas, three golf academies (including a David Leadbetter school where son Andy is the guru-in-residence) and more than 50 tennis courts. Multimillion-dollar mansions line some of the holes. Mission Hills claims to have 10,000 employees, all of whom are barracked, clothed, fed and watered on site, including 3,000 young female caddies. On a visit to Mission Hills three years ago, courses six through 10 had just been finished, from scratch, in little more than a year -- I was told 20,000 people worked on them by day, and another 10,000 by night, under lights. If you look at the place on Google Earth, the fairways look like madly replicating bacteria in a petri dish. And Mission Hills isn't even the biggest golf resort in China. Nanshan International Golf Club in Longkou City, in Shandong Province, has nine holes more -- 12½ courses, 225 holes of golf, six clubhouses -- and by October it will have 54 additional holes and another two clubhouses. But even that will be dwarfed by Mission Hills' grand ambitions in Hainan Island, off China's southern coast, where the hope is to build up to 36 golf courses as part of a master plan to make the island into Asia's Myrtle Beach. Almost all the leading American architects are working in China; domestic work has all but disappeared.

Nobody knows for sure how many golf courses there are in China, but the best guess is 400, a figure that, according to the China Golf Association (see "The Golf Boss") is growing 30 percent a year. That's a meteoric rise for a country that 25 years ago was entirely golf-free. Aylwin Tai recalls Arnold Palmer's first visit to the site of the Chung Shan course in 1982. "Nobody was interested," he says. "No one cared or knew who he was. No one came." Even by the mid-1990s, Beijing had only three golf courses, and there were only about 20 nationwide.

Map: L Dopa

Golf really started to take off in China five years ago, something that a lot of people attribute to the horrific outbreak of SARS, which killed hundreds of people across Asia. "SARS was really the big catalyst for golf," says David Lee, golf consultant and Golf Digest China editorial director. "Before that, people were in karaoke bars, drinking and having business meetings indoors. Then SARS came along, and it wasn't safe to be inside, in public places. Golf was a way to be outside. It was healthy. And people found that they liked the game. And this coincided with an economic boom in 2003." Adds Golf Digest China General Manager Jerome Zhang: "I would say half the golfers in China today started playing during the SARS outbreak -- including me." When I first visited, four years ago, I was told there were 200,000 golfers in China. Now the oft-quoted figure is a million. The China Golf Association says it's four million to five million.

This ongoing growth spurt is remarkable considering that since the beginning of 2004, the government has had a ban on new golf courses. Land is a precious resource. (China's available arable land reportedly fell by 100,000 acres in 2006, dangerously close to what the government calls a "critical" level.) There are massive water shortages across the country. But the real reason for the ban, according to many, is to do with perception. The government, in its quest for a harmonious xiaokang society, can't be seen to support such a bourgeois activity in a People's Republic that is riven with inequality -- even though many politicians are said to be avid golfers.

Like so many things in China -- the no-smoking sections of Beijing restaurants, the cell-phone ban for spectators at the China Open, the notion of intellectual property -- the edict against golf courses seems to be almost entirely theoretical, easily subverted if you have the right guanxi -- connections. You apply to build a "sports park" or a "resort" without necessarily mentioning that one of the facilities will be a golf course. Instead of trying to get a permit from the central government, you work out a deal with local officials. No one I spoke to knew of any new courses that had been ordered to close or pay a fine. Indeed, right under the nose of the central government, in Beijing, there'll be about 20 new courses opening this year, according to Golf Digest China, bringing the total to more than 90, more than any other city in China.