The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  In the weeks leading up to the event, Zhou hadn’t been practicing as much as usual. The collective stress, which had been simmering for some time, began to boil over, causing little trivial tiffs back home with Liu Yan.

  “Sometimes I think being single is best for a professional golfer,” he said. “You don’t need to think about anything, just spending the whole day practicing and at night have fun and relax or whatever. But having a family is just different. Sometimes even when I hear my phone ring I become very uneasy. It doesn’t mean her calling me is annoying, it is just that little things start to add up, and indirectly this affects my mood.”

  Zhou’s poor finish to the season pushed him out of the top twenty on the China Tour’s money list. He failed to earn his elusive pro card.

  “There were some successes and some failures,” Zhou said, looking back. “The good part is I am improved. Kunming was a pity. That tree. I let one ball affect my mood the rest of the way.”

  He hadn’t learned to let go.

  *

  Originally, Zhou and Liu Yan had wanted to schedule the ceremony for November 11, the anniversary of the day they officially professed their love for each other, back in 2004 at Dragon Lake Golf Club. But the restaurant they were looking at wasn’t available that day, so they had to settle for November 10. “I was very irritated,” Zhou said. “Just little things like that really bother me.”

  They didn’t expect many people at the wedding. Many of Zhou’s friends in Guangzhou couldn’t make it, and they hadn’t lived in Chongqing long enough to have a large group of acquaintances. He wasn’t sure if his parents would be able to attend. Liu Yan’s father had already told them that he couldn’t get away – he was too busy overseeing the remodeling of the family house. He’d bought the materials himself and hired workers, and didn’t trust them to use the materials correctly without his oversight. “No time. No other way. Mei banfa!” he had told Liu Yan. Her mother made the journey from Hunan with Liu Yan’s brother and his wife.

  Zhou and Liu Yan were married in a large private dining room in a downtown high-rise. It was a small yet colorful affair, a Chongqing take on a Western-style wedding, if some aspects of the evening seemed to happen in reverse. The couple arrived in a rented white Mercedes-Benz. The guests waited outside the building entrance, armed with confetti and streamers, pieces of which stayed attached to the bride and groom for the remainder of the afternoon. In the lobby, the couple welcomed their guests in a receiving line of sorts, with Liu Yan lighting cigarettes for all.

  The dining room, which served as a setting for both the wedding ceremony and the celebratory meal, was awash in pink. At the back of the room stood an archway covered in fake flowers and pink chiffon. The front of the room was all pink curtains. The showpiece was a large portrait of Zhou and Liu Yan, framed by a ring of pink feathers and accented by strings of white holiday lights.

  There were seven tables for the fifty or so guests, among them just a couple of Zhou’s fellow golfers from the China Tour. At the center of each table the guests found a bottle of Sprite, a bottle of Pepsi, a bottle of Changyu Pioneer red wine, a box of baijiu, a pack of Double Happiness cigarettes and a bowl with an assortment of peanuts, sunflower seeds and candy. Loud English-language pop music billowed from several speakers.

  Zhou wore a black pinstriped suit with a yellow shirt and silver tie. Liu Yan looked lovely in a lacy white wedding dress with a veil and dangling crystal jewelry. But this was, by and large, not a formal affair. Many guests wore jeans. Some had sneakers on.

  When everyone was seated at their tables, the couple walked down the aisle together, from the pink archway to the wall of pink curtains. The marriage ceremony was conducted via microphone by an offstage emcee. This was followed by a traditional tea-drinking ceremony and a series of modern additions: a champagne tower; a bouquet toss; a bubble machine; a wardrobe change; more confetti; and dinner. Then the baijiu flowed. A couple of the guests passed out before dark.

  Zhou and Liu Yan couldn’t have been more in love. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to be there to see it. Zhou’s parents couldn’t make the journey from Qixin.

  *

  Zhou and Liu Yan’s apartment was 1,300 square feet on the ninth floor of a thirty-story building. Zhou would have liked to buy a flat on a higher level for the resale value, were he not deathly afraid of heights – strange for a guy who grew up on the side of a mountain. “Even with a balcony or a window,” Zhou said, “when I get closer to the edge I just feel like my flesh is falling off my body, one layer at a time.” The ninth floor was high enough for Zhou, who, if he stood on his balcony a safe distance from the rail, could crane his neck and see a sliver of netting and green grass on the driving range where he worked. The rest was obscured by another high-rise apartment building. There were high-rises everywhere, tall, boxy and new. Just a few years earlier, this area had been all but empty.

  With all the changes in his life, Zhou hadn’t been able to practice all winter. Decorating his new apartment in Chongqing turned into a long ordeal. For several months he was forced to monitor it on his own. That was because Liu Yan had returned home to her parents’ village, Tanzishan, in Hunan province, for their baby’s birth.

  Liu Yan’s childhood had been pretty happy, so it was hard for her to imagine what life had been like for her father when he was young. He was born in the 1950s and came of age in Chairman Mao’s China. He would tell Liu Yan about those days, and how hard they were. His family often didn’t have enough wheat, so they ate the chaff. It wasn’t just his family that was so hard hit; everyone in the area was relying on the chaff to survive. Liu Yan’s mother told her this was because corrupt local officials kept all the real food for themselves. Sometimes, as a child, Liu Yan’s father was so constipated from not eating enough fiber that his father had to use a finger to dig the feces out of him. “When I think about this, it makes me want to cry,” Liu Yan said.

  He’d had no childhood. He had started working when he was five years old, pulling his father’s cart in the fields. He quit school after the third grade and left home at a very young age to earn money. When he was ten he found a job as a laborer on a reservoir construction site, carrying sand and rocks from one place to another. He worked every day but Sunday.

  In his teens, he had bounced from one job to another. He sold lumber, medicine, chickens; he even sold ice cream for a while. To do business, he traveled across China, to places like Guangdong, Guangxi and Zhou’s family’s province, Guizhou. When he was twenty he saw that there was money to be made selling eggs wholesale. Every day, he’d take eggs from Hunan across the border, to cities like Zhanjiang in Guangdong province. After about ten years selling chicken eggs, he’d saved enough – sixty thousand yuan – to build the only house Liu Yan could remember from her own childhood. It was three stories tall, one of the nicest buildings in the village at the time.

  Liu Yan’s parents told her that things started to get better in 1979 and 1980, when the land was divided among the people. People in the village started to build more houses, and very few of them were made of earth, as was common before. The main road, which had once been very narrow, was widened. Soon enough, it would run all the way to Guilin, in Guangxi. In 1994, Liu Yan’s father and seven friends took advantage of Deng’s “opening up” reforms to start a small business. They built a red brick factory on some old farmland. Business was good for a while, but then the area’s earth no longer produced the clay to make the bricks. Now, her father kept chickens on the land near the factory, but it wasn’t enough to support the family. So he started to sell fertilizer and collect recycling – mostly bottles and cardboard. He also fixed watches.

  Liu Yan had come to realize her father had been worried about Zhou because it had been so hard for her family in the old days. Her father wanted the best for his only daughter, and this older man, from a poor family, with an unstable job playing a game he’d never heard of, was not the son-in-law of his dreams. If he was honest, though, Liu Ya
n’s father saw a little bit of himself in Zhou. When he was courting Liu Yan’s mother, he didn’t have money either, and no one in her family approved of their relationship. Over the months, Liu Yan’s parents had come to respect Zhou’s drive and determination. And now that she was expecting a baby, Liu Yan felt sure she could count on her father’s support.

  She was due in a couple of months, and she already knew she was expecting a son. She’d had two ultrasounds, and the doctors weren’t supposed to tell her the baby’s sex, but, she said, “This is the countryside, and things are a little different.”

  There was less pressure in the village. The pace of life was less intense. She was going to stay in Tanzishan for a month or two after the birth, following the tradition of zuo yuezi, or confinement. During that time, her mother would take care of her and the new baby. Plus, although Zhou was insisting that he and Liu Yan take care of their baby on their own, he was busy – decorating the apartment, yes, but also teaching and training. And the 2008 China Tour would start up right after the baby’s due date.

  Still, Liu Yan was eager to get back to Chongqing. “Every day here is kind of dull. Sometimes I help my mother in the kitchen. Sometimes I just stand on the balcony and stare at the road and the train tracks, and the smokestack from the chemical factory. After nine o’clock at night, you can’t see any lights on the road. By that time, most of the people here have already gone to bed,” she said.

  “The city is more convenient, more exciting. In Chongqing, I can go out shopping for fun. I can read books. The village doesn’t even have a book store.”

  Liu Yan’s mother said that Tanzishan hadn’t grown as fast as other villages nearby. She blamed the local government officials for this – they were corrupt, she said, one thing that hadn’t changed since the old days.

  *

  Despite Beijing’s golf course moratorium, some big developers continued to show a remarkable ability to manage and massage guanxi with local government officials. Without the right connections, it would never have been possible to operate on the grand scale needed to build a golf resort. And managing and massaging guanxi was often a very tangible business. Sources familiar with one company said that before launching a large golf course construction project in Guangdong, the developer outfitted the local police department with a new fleet of motorcycles. On Hainan island, it was said the company built the county a brand new government office building during the negotiations over another large golf-related development. That land deal fell through, but the building, or at least the shell of it, remained. “It’s sitting there like a big old white elephant,” a local source said. “That’s development in China right there.”

  Most successful developers have at least one person, if not a team of three or four, whose only job is to maintain solid relationships with – if not blatantly pay off – the local officials who sign off on various aspects of development projects, regardless of the directives from Beijing. These staffers call themselves CEOs, “chief entertainment officers,” because they’re constantly picking up the tab for meals, drinks and trips to the local karaoke joint (“chief enticement officer” might be a better title). First, there’s the money that changes hands while a project is trying to get approved, and then there’s the money that changes hands while the project is trying to avoid being shut down. “It’s just to keep the trucks going, keep the villagers out of the way, secure the land,” a source said. “It’s just one thing after another.”

  There was one project on the mainland where the owner didn’t play the game well with the local government, and to onlookers it was clear from early on that “the job would go on forever.” Relatively minor land issues with villagers went unresolved because the owner was “tighter than hell” and “always trying to negotiate down to nothing.” Everything with the owner “just takes forever and ever and ever,” a source said. “He will always have problems,” the person added.

  Some successful developers, on the other hand, weren’t afraid to throw money at problems. They often realized that a big outlay of money now would likely save them from expensive delays later. “At the end of the day, they’re doing it the right way – for China,” a source said. “I mean, it’s just the money they’d lose by having all these people out there and delaying the project and all. You know, they’ve done it. They’ve been there. They’re the experts on it.”

  Developers have been known to name a local village head as a subcontractor on critical projects. The village head makes somewhere on the order of five yuan per day for every villager he brings onto the project as a laborer, and that quickly adds up – at certain points during construction, a massive development can have thousands of local villagers on the payroll. The village head is indebted to the developer, and the developer knows it has someone who will defend the project if and when land issues arise. When disputes with villagers escalated at Haikou, one call from Mission Hills was all it took to get busloads of local officials on the scene to work things out.

  Developers “know all the games to play,” one contractor said. “That’s just the China way.”

  Of course, there are times when problems don’t get worked out, regardless of how much money gets thrown at them. A prime example was a monster project that Martin Moore had worked on. The owner was a billionaire real estate tycoon, one of the richest men in China. He had dreams as big as his bank account, and set his sights on a prime piece of land, a spot so beautiful that it could have been part of a national park. It had everything – steep cliff faces, stunning mountain views from almost every angle and, at the center of it all, a large meandering lake that would bring water into play on nearly every hole. He hired one of the world’s most celebrated golf course architects to draw up a signature design. And he was busy buying up decaying resorts all over the area. He hoped this would be the first of as many as six golf courses he’d build there. Big numbers like this were becoming common in China – everyone was chasing after the Chus.

  But Martin’s experienced eye saw problems lurking at the site from the start. Right where the course’s first three holes would be, there was a well-established village, whose residents also claimed some ownership of various other sections of the course. When Martin first arrived, he noticed several villagers had begun to build new, taller homes – a sure sign they were trying to score larger relocation settlements. Martin could tell these villagers were well informed, and canny. They weren’t going down without a fight.

  Then there was the rest of the course, hugging the lake, which happened to be connected upstream to a large reservoir. At the moment, the land was dry. The water was about five yards lower than what was considered “safe” for the course from a flooding perspective. But Martin had taken a look at the historical records and found that about a dozen years earlier the lake had risen to around ten yards above the “safe” level. The tycoon assured Martin and his crew that he had an arrangement with the local authorities: should the water start to flood the course, they’d open up the dam at the far end of the lake and draw the water down to a manageable level. Martin was skeptical.

  The course ended up being one of the most drawn-out construction projects of Martin’s career, spanning nearly five years. The delays were partly due to the weather. Brutal winters froze the ground and covered the course with snow, completely shutting down construction for several months each year. But the biggest issue was the land disputes that bedeviled the project from day one.

  It was a story Martin had heard several times before. The owner says he paid the government for the land. The villagers say they didn’t get paid, or that they weren’t paid enough. “I know the owner is just out millions [for the land],” Martin said. “Say he pays a million out, and he gives it to his two or three people who deal with the government. How much do they take? And they go and pay the government. How much does the government take? By the time it gets down to these villagers, I mean, you know, two-thirds, three-quarters of it’s gone. And those guys don’t get shit.”

/>   Not far from the existing village, the owner built what Martin described as “a whole city” with “US townhouses.” The villagers refused to move to them.

  “I don’t blame them,” Martin said. “Better or not better, it’s not their home. Some of these little villages, they’re fourth or fifth generation.”

  While the bickering between the local government and the villagers raged on, Martin’s team built “temporary” versions of holes No. 1, 2 and 3 in a valley far enough from the village to be considered untouchable. But the rest of the project was a constant game of stop-and-start. They waited for the tycoon to say which parts of the land were approved for construction. They would get word that the spats had been settled and it was time to go ahead. Then Martin’s crew would find protesters waiting for them at the job site.

  “They would block the roads,” Martin said. “As soon as you went out there and had equipment running, they would all come up.” The confrontations didn’t become physical, but they were effective nonetheless. Martin said he instructed his guys “to just do what they say, you know. Never told them to challenge them or anything.”

  Construction “came to a complete halt” after villagers took their case to the central government in Beijing. That move put the project, once hidden away in the mountains, in the spotlight – China Central Television even came out to report a story. The unwanted attention couldn’t have come at a worse time. Beijing had just launched what looked like another serious crackdown on golf development, and the tycoon’s dream course was an easy target for the capital’s “golf police.” The owner scrambled to get more approvals and permits to clear the way, but as Martin pointed out, “none of them were for golf, obviously.” There were no official permits for golf courses being issued in those days.