by Dan Washburn
He would not be exposed as a golfer this time, either. The moment he hit the massage chair, he was asleep. His snoring was so loud it drowned out the TV.
An hour went by. Zhou’s name was yelled repeatedly in an attempt to wake him, but he couldn’t be stirred. A second hour of massage followed, after which Zhou’s phone was called repeatedly in hopes the familiar noise might finally rouse the slumbering giant – whose second round tee time was just eight hours away.
First one eye opened, and then the other. Zhou groggily took in his surroundings. Helped to his feet, he slurred, “Am I like John Daly?”
*
There’s a statistic in golf called the “bounce back.” Normally, it measures a golfer’s ability to score a birdie or better on holes that immediately follow a bogey or worse. But perhaps there should be another gauge for how well a golfer can bounce back from a bender the night before. Zhou would have scored well in that regard. So much so that Michael Dickie had no idea that anything might be amiss.
Dickie, a Scot based in Shanghai, was the head instructor at the city’s David Leadbetter Golf Academy at the time (later he would be named coach to the Chinese women’s national team). He’d never met Zhou before, but agreed to follow him around the course that Friday, and he largely liked what he saw: an aggressive, modern-looking golf swing and a lot of brute force. Sure, maybe his swing was too short, maybe he stood too low, but he agreed with Jim Johnson, who had assessed Zhou on the China Tour in 2007: the tools were there. “I’m really impressed with his swing,” Dickie said. “He’s just pure muscle, isn’t he?”
Sure, Dickie had his criticisms, too. Zhou’s putting and course management skills needed work, as did his distance control. And at times Zhou appeared rushed, unfocused. But none of these faults seemed too surprising for a man who taught himself how to play and who had never had a coach.
As the round wore on, however, and Dickie witnessed how Zhou handled adversity – usually, with a long string of expletives – the instructor’s observations grew more perceptive, more personal.
“What’s going on in his life?” Dickie asked after one of Zhou’s eruptions. “Is there something missing? He doesn’t look at peace with himself. All that swearing and the attitude. Not necessarily a chip on his shoulder, but maybe something to do with his upbringing – a sense of inferiority, perhaps. Usually, when everything around a golfer’s life is calm, when they start feeling good on the inside, that is when they start playing well.”
Dickie’s assessment: “He needs to get some Zen about himself.”
Zhou didn’t find any Zen that weekend in Shanghai. Although he made the cut with an even-par 72 on Friday, he finished the tournament tied for fifty-first, after rounds of 77 and 78 on Saturday and Sunday. It was one of the worst China Tour finishes of his career.
Unfortunately, he didn’t find Zen anywhere else, either. Over the rest of the season Zhou placed in the top twenty just once, and finished the 2008 China Tour ranked sixteenth on the Order of Merit. He’d earned 86,525 yuan in before-tax prize money. It was the best total from his four years on tour, but it still didn’t cover his travel expenses.
8
Time to Make Claims
The man wearing a tank top and surfing shorts would normally have been busy shaping a golf hole, but on this day, with a bag of golf clubs slung over one shoulder, he had decided to spend the afternoon playing some of his recent creations. He didn’t have the day off; he just had nothing else to do. “Dozer is down again,” he said with a shrug.
Nearly three years into his first golf course in China, this veteran American shaper had come to expect delays. The broken bulldozer was just the start. Progress on the course had been stalled by everything from typhoons to temples. And lingering land disputes continued to render five holes off-limits to the construction team. “We were originally going to be here a year,” the shaper said. “That was a while ago.”
He chuckled, however, as he was complaining. There were worse places than Hainan to while away time. Even after the island’s elevation to provincial status in 1988, the same year it had become China’s largest special economic zone, Hainan maintained its reputation as an outlaw state, where corruption was king. For years, its economy had arguably been built on smuggling, prostitution and unchecked property speculation.
As China’s middle class grew sharply over the past decade, officials on Hainan and in Beijing decided the island needed to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. Golf, they realized, would need to be part of the equation. Never mind the fact that building a golf course was technically illegal. They’d find a way around that. In 2005, Hainan Vice Governor Chen Cheng had famously said the province strived to have as many as three hundred golf courses some day, and they hoped to make golf its dao qiu, or “island ball.” Hainan was home to eighteen golf courses at the time.
But Hainan was still one of China’s poorest provinces, and it was only accessible by boat or plane. Construction delays were common on the more modern mainland. In backward Hainan, slow motion could turn into super-slow motion all too easily. That much was clear to the project manager on the course with the broken-down bulldozer when he arrived in the summer of 2007. An American, he had never heard of Hainan before landing the job, his first in China. “I thought I was going to hit the ground running,” he said, laughing at his naivety. Instead, he found himself sitting in an office trying to finalize contract details with potential subcontractors.
The Chinese are famous for haggling, and the process dragged on for nearly five months. That was nothing compared to the year-and-a-half he had to wait for a proper piece of equipment for his head shaper. He finally tracked down the right kind of bulldozer in Hong Kong, but for the first two months it was broken down more than it ran. Breakdowns required a repairman to travel from a dealer more than two hours away to fix the machine with “bubble gum and baling wire” until the proper parts arrived from Japan. “I stopped trying to have a schedule on everything a long time ago,” the project manager said. “I have done so many schedules for this golf course. In China, unless you have the Beijing Olympics or the World Expo coming up, a schedule doesn’t mean shit.”
While specialized equipment might have been hard to come by, laborers were not. A small army of more than three hundred workers, mostly women, were recruited, earning around forty yuan a day to help build the course and perform many tasks a machine would typically take care of, by hand. The extra manpower, no matter how motivated, did not speed things up by much. “I think out of our entire team,” the project manager said, “five, maybe ten, of them have even seen golf on TV. So they just don’t understand a lot of it.”
Most frustrating to the project manager were the complications over the land, the ones far beyond his control. In this way, Hainan was no different than any other rural area of China where officials were embracing development. More than half of the country’s 1.4 billion people live in rural areas, and relocating villages had become commonplace. In the last few years, 1.3 million people had been moved in Hubei province alone to make room for the world’s largest dam at the Three Gorges site on the Yangtze. Thousands of villagers had to be relocated to make room for the golf course and surrounding developments taking place on this part of Hainan. Not quite the scale of the world’s largest dam, but relocation was never a comfortable process, no matter how many people were affected.
In China, land is owned by the government, not the villagers. Developers deal with local officials, who in turn are responsible for compensating the displaced residents. On Hainan, villagers quickly became aware that the amount of money filtered down to them was nowhere near the actual value of their land. Residents of one of the coastal villages said they were paid a one-time sum of around sixty thousand yuan (nine thousand dollars) per person to move. In addition, each family was given a new home – a concrete, two-story townhouse in a specially built relocation community on the outskirts of a town, fifteen minutes from the shore by car.
Hainan is a poor province – according to official government statistics from 2012, the average rural family there earned only 7,408 yuan ($1,176) that year – and some of the coastal villagers were happy to take the offer on their land. Although the new, gridded community was a bit soulless compared to their lush and leafy former home, it represented a clear move toward modernity. There was reliable electricity, plumbing, a sewage system and better schools for the children. And the community would stay together.
“We moved because the majority moved,” said one elderly man who converted the ground floor of his home in the relocation neighborhood into a small shop. “Life back in the village was not easy. It was unclean. Fishing was hard work and the money was unpredictable. It’s a more comfortable life here, but I miss the freedom of the village. I miss the ocean.”
Most of those who made the move were skeptical about the future, however. What was going to happen when their compensation money ran out? Nothing had really changed for them, after all. They were still largely a community of uneducated fishermen and farmers. After the development was completed, they would have nowhere to fish or farm. The golf course and new hotels were expected to create thousands of jobs, and the developers held recruitment seminars in the town, where people were given a chance to interview for jobs as caddies, cleaners, landscapers and security guards. Still, most of the local people expressed doubt that such jobs would go to them. “They won’t hire dirty villagers like us,” one said.
Some villagers chose to express displeasure with their displacement the old-fashioned way – they refused to leave. For the past two years, a small contingent of stubborn souls had lived in makeshift homes on top of the rubble of their former village. They were unsatisfied with the compensation packages they had received, and argued they had never been given a voice in the process and had been removed forcibly from their homes. “Money cannot solve the problem now,” said one villager, who claimed to be holding out for either the right to stay or for a stake in the development. “If we move out, the place will never be ours again. Our ancestors left us this piece of land. It can’t just be taken like this. If they had properly compensated us, fine. But the government is so unreasonable. Too greedy.”
On the construction site, the project’s timeline and budget were ballooning while the government tried to persuade the holdouts to move on. “I leave the Chinese politics to the Chinese,” a project manager said. “I try to stick to what I know, and that is building a golf course. When they say I can go work a hole, I work a hole.” When he finally got the go-ahead, obstacles remained. There was a small temple in the middle of what would become the eleventh fairway. It belonged to an elderly couple, and they started living in it, afraid that the temple would be removed before they were properly compensated. The construction team worked around the structure, and every day the project manager would smile and wave at his neighbors as he drove past in his utility vehicle. It wasn’t long before the couple invited him into the temple for dinner.
The job site was also home to hundreds of graves, some centuries old. Mounds of earth occasionally marked by a modest engraved stone, each required careful relocation. Villagers received compensation for each grave removed, and negotiations over the payout for a single tomb had held up work on a hole for half a year. The project manager had picked up only a few words of Chinese, but one of them was fenmu, the word for “grave.” He had also learned jiade, the word for “fake.” Because money was involved, some villagers saw this as one of the few chances to get extra cash for their land. Phony graves frequently appeared overnight.
Entire villages, too, had been known to pop up, as opportunistic squatters tried to earn displacement packages. Some cunning villagers tried to double-dip. They’d receive compensation to leave their village one day, and the next day establish residency in another village that had yet to be relocated.
On another project in southern Hainan, aggrieved villagers built cinderblock structures hurriedly along the dirt road leading to the construction site. It was a desperate attempt to claim larger relocation settlements from the local government – since the more property you own, the larger your payout. When the money didn’t arrive, they took to blocking the access road. The protests, usually peaceful, shut down construction for three weeks. Such delays were nothing new to this project; various land issues had caused several stoppages since work began.
“We would come to work for a week and then they would shut it down for a week and then we’d work for a week,” explained that project manager, who said his team generally had a good relationship with the villagers, even the ones who would occasionally form a human roadblock. “They would come over and say, ‘Hey, don’t work today.’ Nothing real hostile. Some of the other jobs I’ve known in China, it’s been pretty hostile, where it’s a safety issue.”
The project manager did recall one instance where he felt his safety was at risk. He was visiting the job site with the course architect, and they had been warned when they arrived that villagers were planning to block the access road soon. “Finish up your business and get out of here,” they were told. But when they attempted their exit, the road was already blocked.
“The first thing I see is some guy – they are usually pretty drunk – and he came running toward our truck with a big brick,” the project manager said.
The project manager and the architect quickly locked their doors and the driver, a local man, attempted to negotiate. Once the protesters learned the car’s occupants were not with the Chinese developer or the local government, tempers began to abate. “We heard them say gweilo, or foreigner, and then they started easing up,” he said. “Near the end they were apologizing. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ We said, ‘Okay, no problem. We understand.’ They just want their money. That’s the whole thing.”
Not long after, early one morning, several hundred government employees arrived at the site, armed with heavy equipment. They knocked the cinderblock houses down one by one.
“Often, as is the case in China, you just have to take a deep breath and relax,” said a Western representative for the developer of the shoreline project. “Things will happen, but in good time. You can’t force things. The country is simply run differently.”
As it happened, such differences made some aspects of building a golf course easier in China. In the United States, anyone trying to develop on a shoreline would have to jump through a series of complex and time-consuming regulatory hoops, from city to county to state to federal, in an effort to receive proper approvals. There would be issues to negotiate with coastal commissions, community groups and environmental organizations. Most developers agree that it would be almost impossible to build another Pebble Beach in the United States nowadays. But in Hainan? “There are no official environmental challenges here at all,” said the developer’s representative, noting that rather strict land planning laws exist in China, but are enforced haphazardly. “I don’t think China has reached that stage just yet. It’s up to the owner if you want to be responsible or not.”
That’s a scary prospect anywhere in the world, but in this case the developers were determined to do things right. They brought in an environmentally-minded firm to do the master planning, and their initial surveys confirmed what the project manager observed upon arrival: “There was no ecosystem here. Everything was raped and pillaged.”
Several decades of development have taken their toll on Hainan’s ecology. Some sixty years ago, the major culprit was the conversion of ancient woodlands into “commercial forests,” used to produce rubber, timber and, more recently, paper. These had a huge effect on Hainan’s biodiversity. Many native plant and animal species came under severe threat, most notably the Hainan gibbon, which today is the most endangered ape in the world according to the Zoological Society of London. In the 1950s, there were about two thousand Hainan gibbons on the island; now, there are between twenty-three and twenty-five, all in the Bawangling Nature Reserve, in western Hainan, established in 1980. Logging was banne
d in Hainan’s natural forests in the 1990s, but enforcement of the law has been erratic. Greed, lack of manpower and oversight get in the way. In more recent decades, hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest and natural habitat have been lost thanks to the out-of-control real estate market and the slash-and-burn farming techniques of local villagers.
Environmentalists would likely applaud the efforts this golf course has made to clean up nearby waterways heavily polluted by human waste and scores of tiny fish farms, and restore ecological diversity to the land – the sandy soil had been rendered nearly lifeless after many years of water-intensive watermelon farming. The designers and the construction team were also intent on building a course as natural-looking as possible. They set large areas aside for landscaping, and planted only species native to the island. They created wetlands and reintroduced mangrove forests. Birdlife began to return to the area. Seashore paspalum grass was planted because of its ability to tolerate saltwater and gray water. Fairway runoff was designed to flow back into the course’s irrigation ponds and, once the hotels and residences were completed, effluent would be treated and then used as an irrigator, as well. “It’s all going to be worth it,” the shaper said. “And, actually, I’ve really learned to like it here. I think we are going to look back at this in five years and say, ‘God, too bad it didn’t go on another year or two.’”
But for now, no one was allowed to talk about it – on the record, at least. The politics were just too complicated.
*
By late 2008, Wang Libo’s new home was almost completed. It was a colossal structure, right on the edge of the cement road, where it couldn’t be missed. From the outside, it resembled a fancy jail, with shiny metal bars covering the house’s square windows of blue, reflective glass, the kind you might see on one of the brand-new high-rises on the mainland, in Shenzhen or Chongqing. The brick and cement walls of Wang’s house were covered in a glossy tan tile. All the lines were clean. Everything was symmetrical. At ground level there were two massive metal front doors, square, just like the windows. They probably measured twelve feet by twelve feet and opened onto a cavernous ground level, with fifteen-foot-tall ceilings and a bare cement floor. It was Wang’s garage, and it was large enough to fit dozens of san lun che, the type of three-wheeled truck he used for his livelihood. The living quarters on the second floor were basic and spare and totally devoid of character. But the walls were flat and smooth, the floors covered with cold tile. For Meiqiu, it felt like a mansion.