The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Soon, Martin’s crew noticed helicopters flying overhead with some regularity. “The owner’s people told us to fill in all the bunkers and plant grass over them,” he said. “They told us to put dirt over all the cart paths. They said they didn’t want it to look like a golf course. I thought it was the stupidest thing – there’s no way you’re going to disguise this so it’s not a golf course.”

  While Martin began to question whether the project would ever reach the finish line, the owner continued to dream the way only a billionaire can. His first course may be in jeopardy, but that wouldn’t stop him from thinking about courses No. 2, No. 3 and beyond. He had representatives from every celebrity designer out to visit the site, from Greg Norman to Tiger Woods. “Give him credit,” Martin said of the tycoon, “he’s got an imagination. He can sit there and think.” Sometimes, though, imagination coupled with a seemingly endless budget can drive a person a little crazy. “Can we put a waterfall here?” was one of the owner’s favorite questions. Waterfalls, unfortunately, couldn’t hide a course from the golf police.

  Although the village itself never moved, the land disputes and the scrutiny from the authorities eventually died down enough to where Martin’s team could finish the course. The result was beautiful. Many who saw it thought it might be one of the best in China – and it had better have been. The owner had spent forty million dollars on the project, more than four times what was considered expensive in this country.

  But then it started to rain. And the water began to rise, well beyond the “safe” level. The government didn’t do a thing, and the entire golf course was submerged in four yards of water.

  “It’s ruined,” Martin said. “Simply the opening of a gate would save him forty million dollars. And he obviously doesn’t have the pull to make that happen. The government’s in a bind. If the local government opens the gate and lets the water down to save an illegal golf course, there’d be some definite ramifications there.”

  The tycoon refused to give up, however. He hired the same designer to route another nine holes on the side of a mountain, six yards above the high-water mark. He thought another thirty million dollars would be enough to make it happen.

  *

  Ken Chu was certainly not the only Chinese golf course owner with high expectations. Take the golf course developer everybody called “the Chairman,” whose boardroom antics made Donald Trump look like Donald Duck. The Chairman was a pedant for punctuality. If someone arrived a second late for a meeting, his security guards blocked them from entering via the main door to the boardroom. Instead, he or she would have to go outside and walk around the side of the building to an alternate entrance. That door led the person upstairs, then downstairs, before finally reaching the back door to the boardroom. That forced the latecomer to enter the room from behind the Chairman’s custom-made leather executive chair, which extended two feet over the top of the Chairman’s head. The twenty to forty pairs of eyes around the table would avoid catching the gaze of the late arrival as he or she slipped into the room.

  The latecomer would take a chair at the table, but without any formal acknowledgment from the Chairman or the assembled senior staff. For a while the meeting would carry on normally, often with a PowerPoint presentation projected on a screen. The Chairman demanded all presentations come with visual aids, giving him a reason to use his beloved laser pointers, of which a multicolored collection was always lined up neatly on the table in front of him. And then, sometimes, the Chairman would issue a fine or two. For example, if some work wasn’t completed because a fleet of trucks didn’t make it to the site, the Chairman would single out the person responsible, slam the table and say, “You’re fined! Two thousand yuan!” This was business as usual at the Chairman’s weekly meetings.

  Five minutes or so later, however, the Chairman would pounce on the latecomer. No matter the person’s position within the company, or the country on his or her passport, the humiliation was the same. The Chairman would abruptly stop the meeting and “chew them out big time,” Martin reported. At very least, the latecomer would be told to spend the remainder of the meeting, which would often go on for two hours, standing at his or her seat. Usually, however, the Chairman would tell the person to stand in the corner facing the wall “like you’re in kindergarten.” Staff being disciplined, with their backs to the rest of the group, would have to shout updates into the room’s luscious wood paneling.

  “Everything he does is like to show everyone, ‘I’m the king. I’ve got all the power. I can do anything I want to do,’” Martin said. “They all want to look good in front of their whole staff, and if he can make a foreigner do what he says, he’s really the king, you know.”

  The Chairman took aim at Martin’s American project manager on a couple of occasions. Tardy for the weekly meeting, the manager had to take the walk of shame, knowing full well what would follow. He took his seat, and waited. Several minutes went by and then the Chairman, with the face of a disappointed parent, looked at the project manager and spoke. A young woman sitting next to the Chairman translated.

  “The Chairman said because you arrived late to the meeting, you must stand up now,” she said.

  The project manager had discussed the possibility of such an occurrence with Martin beforehand.

  “Martin, do I really have to stand if I am late for a meeting?” he had asked.

  “That’s up to you,” Martin said. “You don’t have to. But I’ll say one thing. If he does stand you there and point you out like that, and you take it like everyone else does, you’ll earn so much respect from him.”

  So Martin’s project manager got up from his seat and stood there at the conference for the remaining ninety minutes of the meeting.

  A couple weeks later, the project manager’s driver was delayed and he arrived late for the meeting once again. This time, as he walked in behind the Chairman, the project manager just said, “I know. I know. I’ve got to stand up.”

  The group emitted a rare collective chuckle.

  “The Chairman would like to know why you were late,” the translator said.

  The project manager explained about the driver.

  “Okay, the Chairman said you can sit down,” the translator said.

  “No, I was late. I’ll stand.”

  The two, via the translator, went back and forth like that for a while.

  “Part of it is a game, you know,” Martin said. “Part of it is you’re trying to figure out someone’s personality. I know what the Chairman’s like. I’m not going to challenge him. And I’m not going to argue with him. If you go in there and say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to stand over there,’ or something like that, I mean, you’re done. You’re done forever. But if you stand up and you make him look good in front of all his staff, like, ‘I made the foreigners look bad,’ he’ll love you. That’ll last so long.”

  The Chairman has been known to take his executives on impromptu extreme-team-building exercises, including eight-hour hikes in the mountains. “Some people pass out,” Martin said. “And when it’s all done, he thinks it brings all of them closer together.”

  The Chairman was a small man, but he lived large. Among his fleet of automobiles was a one-million-dollar luxury sedan the size of a Hong Kong studio apartment. It featured fully reclining rear seats and multiple flatscreen TVs. Front to back, the car measured a titanic 6.2 yards; so long, in fact, that it qualified as a truck in several Chinese cities. Officially, it was required to display the yellow license plate usually reserved for trucks and buses, but the Chairman had no intention of having his luxury car lumped in with working class vehicles, so he chose to go without a license plate at all.

  “I don’t think anyone stops him,” Martin said.

  The same could be said of the Chairman’s accountant. “He goes all out,” Martin said. “He’s a big spender.” When his celebrity course designer is visiting and the Chairman takes his team out to dinner, it’s nothing for him to drop seventy thousand dollars
on a table of twelve. It’s abalone. It’s the finest wines. It’s a different world.

  Martin recalled a conversation he had with the course designer’s No. 2 man, not long after such a meal.

  “You know that meal we had last week?” the man said.

  “Yeah,” Martin replied. “It was pretty good.”

  “It was sixty-five thousand dollars. Those bottles of wine we drank? They were twenty-eight hundred dollars apiece. We had fourteen of them.”

  When VIPs came to visit, the Chairman was known to splash out on lavish gifts, items worth ten thousand dollars or more, like jade golf balls or gold swords.

  But the Chairman was modest in comparison to some of China’s tycoons. Another golf course owner was “richer than all of them,” said Martin. His company’s website boasted about a $57 million private jet and a thirty-five-foot yacht, purchased from a celebrity athlete for $20 million.

  Meetings with this owner were also an experience. They required a meeting about the meeting, the evening before the meeting, to discuss “what’s going to be talked about, what we can say, what we can’t say.” It was common for the owner’s staff to go without sleep during the twenty-four hours leading up to a meeting, regardless of its significance or urgency – every meeting the owner attended was significant and urgent. Everything needed to be perfect.

  One time, a meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m., but it was made clear to Martin that arriving after 8 a.m. was unacceptable. The morning of the meeting, he realized why. While there were only sixteen participants, there were probably a couple dozen additional people scurrying around the place, adjusting this, fixing that. There were two men assigned to placing the attendees around the table. Like persnickety wedding planners, they told Martin and the others not just where to sit, but how.

  “You,” they’d say. “Move your chair two inches to the right.”

  “You. Move that laptop three inches to the left.”

  “You. No iPads allowed.”

  Everyone was told that if they planned to take notes during the meeting, they were only permitted to do so on paper featuring the name and logo of the owner’s company, using similarly branded pencils and pens. All these items, Martin noticed, were laid out neatly on the table in front of him. So much activity, and the meeting hadn’t even started yet.

  This was an introductory meeting, the kickoff to the construction project, and the owner wasted no time dressing down his staff, who had worked so hard to make the meeting a success. He mentioned Martin’s experience at Spring City, and discussed the impressive resumé of the foreign management team the owner had hired to oversee things. “My team is bad,” the owner said to the room filled with many members of his team. “They have failed in the past. So now we’re bringing in a whole new team.” Then he addressed his staff specifically, “I suggest you all watch and learn.”

  When he wasn’t talking, the owner puffed on a clunky Sherlock Holmes-style calabash pipe incessantly for the duration of the three-hour meeting. He came prepared for the long haul, too. He had a rotation of three pipes, tended by two young women whose sole role at the meeting was to see that the owner’s pipe was always full and firing. Several times during the meeting, the owner would abruptly hold his pipe above his head. Instantly, one of the minders would appear, take the spent pipe from the owner’s hand and replace it with a freshly packed one. She’d hold a flame to the new pipe as the owner took his first puffs. Then she’d disappear again.

  *

  People unfamiliar with the way China works often express confusion as to how a country can experience a golf course boom during a moratorium on golf course construction. Those who’ve spent more than five minutes in China do not suffer from such confusion. In fact, the Chinese have several sayings for the disconnect that often exists between Beijing’s best intentions and how they’re interpreted – or simply ignored – out in the provinces:

  上有政策, 下有对策 (Shang you zheng ce, xia you dui ce)

  Where there are policies from above, there are counter-policies from below.

  政令不出中南海 (Zheng ling bu chu zhong nan hai)

  Policies and commands stop at the gate of Zhongnanhai.

  山高皇帝远 (Shan gao huang di yuan)

  The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.

  Simply put, golf courses can’t be built in China without major government involvement, but that involvement is always at the local level. Indeed, local officials will often seek out golf-based real estate developments, believing them to be magnets for high-end businesses and a well-to-do clientele, not to mention major generators of tax revenues. That’s because golf isn’t taxed like a sport in China; it’s taxed as an entertainment venue, similar to a karaoke club, at a hefty 23.5 percent rate. In recent years, some local governments have begun offering special deals or incentives that bring this down to a more manageable rate, around 10 percent. One developer likened golf in China to prostitution. “That’s illegal, too,” he said. “But there are still prostitutes everywhere in this country.”

  But, perhaps most importantly, local governments welcome land-hungry developments, such as those that involve golf, because they own the land. Ministry of Land Resources data and Chinese media reports in recent years suggest that anywhere between 20 to 50 percent of annual revenues enjoyed by local governments in China come from the sale of land. That doesn’t take into account the amount officials pocket on the sly, of course. “These local governments, they want money,” a contractor working in Hainan explained. “All the chiefs, all the mayors, they’re making tons of money on this stuff. Why are they not going to let it happen?” Another golf industry professional noted that the term limits set for local government officials encouraged a sort of “race” mentality – “I’ve got three years to make as much money as I can” is common thinking among bureaucrats.

  Local governments are typically willing to “fudge things” in an effort to, literally and figuratively, get the ball rolling on lucrative land development. The benefits, most reckon, outweigh the risks, even the risk that Beijing might crack down on a project that is technically illegal. But the governments are also sly. The first rule when planning a golf course in China: Don’t use the world “golf.”

  “It didn’t go away – the moratorium is still there,” one industry pro reported. “People just figure out other ways to do it. No one calls it a ‘golf course’ now. It’s green space, it’s equestrian, it’s an exercise field. They are creative. But the government knows. It’s just all about loop holes.”

  The government office tasked with attracting investment to a district on the outskirts of Haikou, not far from the Mission Hills site in Hainan, had learned the tricks.

  One official said that, while most of the prime shoreline properties on the island had already been snatched up, they still had “plenty” of plots dominated by volcanic rock, which is useless for growing crops. Farmland and forest were off-limits to investors, but this land was available.

  What if an American company wanted to build a golf course on it?

  “Foreign companies can’t build golf courses,” he said. “In China, there is a restriction on golf.”

  What about Mission Hills?

  “They are a domestic company, and they are not doing golf.”

  What were they doing then?

  “Leisure!” he said with a wink. “Just don’t mention golf.”

  To get around the restrictions, savvy developers would label their projects as “resorts.” The official explained: “Plant some flowers and trees, no problem. And maybe some people grab a club and hit a ball. That’s just leisure.” The official, tall and tanned with a relaxed demeanor, mentioned that he played golf a couple times a month.

  The agreement between Mission Hills and Hainan’s Xiuying District, which administered much of the land in question for Project 791, never once used the world “golf.” The document, according to one of the first investigative stories about it, which appeared in the China You
th Daily newspaper, described a “land consolidation” project that would feature “sports and leisure,” “health facilities,” “culture and entertainment,” “leisure and business,” “international competitions,” “conferences and exhibitions,” “creative industries” and “suitable living.” The agreement suggested the project would create a “new type of tourism,” which would “improve the production and living standards of the local farmers and promote the building of a new socialist countryside.” The contract went so far as to label Project 791 as “ecological restoration.” The development, the document argued, would “improve the ecological environment” of the area, which ranged from north of Volcano Crater National Park to far south of Wang Libo’s village, Meiqiu.

  *

  Wang was aware of the tenuous grip he had on his family’s land. It had been theirs for decades – centuries, in the case of some plots. But he saw the writing on the wall.

  And so, despite concerns about the legacy he’d leave for his children, despite his suspicion he wasn’t getting a fair price for his land, and despite his reluctance to say goodbye to the money-earning lychee trees that grew on some of his acreage, he did what he could to speed up the land sale process, not long after the meeting under the phoenix tree.

  “The developers and the government negotiated this deal without any discussions with the villagers,” he said. “And the land payouts were set by the government. How can I bargain with them? How can I protest and fight against the government and the rich people? They are too powerful to be challenged. What is best for me is go with the trend. So I never protested. I invited the land-measuring team from the town government. Also I invited the town-level official to verify the measuring process on the spot. After they finished, I signed my name and got the money. It’s best to go with the government, and figure out a new way to make a living.”

  Not everyone took Wang’s approach. In late March 2008, riots broke out in the village of Yongdong, four miles northeast of Meiqiu. Hundreds of villagers, some wielding machetes and other farming tools, took to Changqiao Hill in an attempt to stop the Mission Hills construction crew from working on their land. The villagers were enraged by rumors that the per-mu prices presented to them by the local government were nowhere near the amount Mission Hills had paid. Indeed, a public document on the website of the Haikou city government listed the benchmark land prices for business development in the Yongdong area as 135,000 to 150,000 yuan per mu – about $19,000 to $22,000. For Meiqiu it was higher still: 145,000 to 185,000 yuan per mu. No one knows for sure what Mission Hills actually paid, but with villagers only getting 12,500 to 29,000 per mu, a lot of cash was getting caught up somewhere else.