Banned – and booming: the strange world of Chinese golf

I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone manage in China, I lamented. The two men burst out laughing. I had not understood at all. ‘Because everything is forbidden, everything is permitted. You are free to do anything,’ they assured me.

Dan Washburn in his book The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, uses golf and the business around it to pin down the paradox that is China today. Golf is his back door into understanding the last 20 years, as China has grappled with modernity and an unnerving speed of change. Corruption, rural land disputes, environmental destruction, economic growth, the chasm between rich and poor and the supremacy of political whim over the rule of law: it is all here in this engrossing story.

Mao Zedong banned golf courses as a decadent and dangerous import — the ‘green opium’. The building of golf courses is still banned by central government, even as building booms in the provinces. From 2005 to 2010 the number of golf courses tripled to more than 600, despite them being technically illegal. Government officials use false names when they play and wear long-sleeved shirts to avoid the giveaway golfer’s tan. That is the central contradiction of golf in China that my Shanghai friends understood only too well.

Washburn chose three men to tell his story and has followed them for a number of years. Zhou Xunshu, the would-be professional golfer, comes from a tiny village in one of China’s poorer provinces; Martin Moore, an American and China’s most successful builder of golf courses; and Wang, the peasant farmer whose family land is stolen to build the Mission Hills golf course in Hainan.

Martin Moore, in the tradition of foreign businessmen in China from Marco Polo onwards, describes a fabulous world of money, power and whim.