The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Not ten feet from the back door was the cement home Wang and his wife had built in 2000. It looked ancient by comparison, and was dwarfed by its new neighbor. From the new house’s flat roof, Wang could look out and see a timeline of his life. Off in the distance, what to most looked like wild forest, Wang knew to be Cangdao, the now overgrown remains of the village his ancestors had fled at the time of the Japanese invasion in the Second World War. Wang’s eyes traced the path his terrified grandparents must have followed to Meiqiu. There, he spotted the phoenix tree and, not far from it, the tile top of his parents’ lava stone abode, where he had grown up. Nearby, the lychee trees he had once climbed for both work and play.

  To see his most recent history, all Wang had to do was look down. There before him was his first modest cement home, the first place of his own, which just eight years earlier had represented a major leap from old village ways. On the opposite side of his new home, parked next to the cement road, Wang could see his san lun che, which provided his new steady source of income not reliant on harvest seasons or the whims of Mother Nature.

  On a clear day, Wang could gaze far beyond the cement road and see hints of the Haikou skyline, which had grown in ways his grandfather would have thought unimaginable. In recent months, Wang’s view of the city had been partially occluded by a haze of red dust emanating from Project 791, the massive construction site nearby – but that construction site was the only reason Wang could enjoy this lofty perch in the first place.

  These days, Wang was looking younger than his thirty-seven years, with his baby face, full lips, big eyes and black hair kept in a crew cut. The worries of the past seemed to no longer play across his brow. Perhaps that was because Wang had been one of the first villagers to sell his land. In the end, he had sold nine mu, which netted him around 180,000 yuan, most of which went directly into his new house. Initially, he had, like the others, considered trying to fight the sale of land that featured some of his most prized fruit trees, or trying to negotiate a higher price. But then he considered the parties involved – a powerful Hong Kong developer, an unscrupulous local government, and a poor villager with a three-wheeled truck – and quickly determined his case was hopeless. People are offering you money for your land, he thought. More money than you ever thought anyone would pay for your land. Take the money while it’s still there.

  The people of Yangshan district, the volcanic expanse of which Meiqiu was a part, had always felt a special connection to their land. There was a pride of ownership, even though “ownership” hadn’t been the appropriate word for decades. The government owns all land in China; the villagers just lease it. Still, many area residents felt they were closer to being landowners than most rural Chinese. “The land in Yangshan is different,” Wang said. “It was passed down to us by our ancestors, so you get whatever your parents gave you. And if your grandparents or parents had money, they could buy more land and you get more. It’s not like collectively owned rice fields or other farmland. Our land is individually owned.”

  So, whereas in other parts of rural China, the proceeds from a large land sale would be split up evenly among the villagers, in Meiqiu there were definite haves and have-nots. It all depended on how forward-thinking a person’s forebears had been, and where the Red Line happened to fall.

  Tucked somewhere safe in every village household was a bundle of old documents, tattered, stained and brown with age. These papers, some more than half a century old, told the story of the land, of Meiqiu and, in some ways, of China. They had the look and feel of old treasure maps, and in some cases had indeed led their owners to previously unimaginable riches. But the bounty came with an uncertain future.

  Typically, the oldest document in the bundle was in traditional characters, and read top to bottom and right to left. Titled “Land and Real Estate Ownership Certificate” and dated July 1953, four years after Mao and the Communists came to power, it stated in no uncertain terms that the parties named on the certificate were the sole private owners of the land, and that their rights of ownership cannot be infringed. This was thanks to the Land Reform Law, a mass experiment that took land from feudal landlords and gave it back to the peasants. The law had been formally adopted three years earlier, in 1950. Everything took a little bit longer to reach Hainan.

  The documents themselves were beautiful, with carefully handwritten characters in black ink and a square chop, or seal, and an ornate calligraphic signature in red to make it all official. Most would say these relics were of little legal value, and might be better off displayed in some kind of museum, but the villagers clung to the papers because they represented the only written proof to their claims. For each parcel of land, the certificate listed the county, the type of land and how many mu were included. Then it identified what’s known as the “four to’s,” which took the place of latitude and longitude in specifying the boundaries of the property. For example, one section might read: “East to Shengshu; South to Meixiao; West to Laiji; North to Guoshi.” Not exactly scientific, so people built walls, and those lava rock partitions had largely stood the test of time.

  The walls remained, even as private ownership soon gave way to collective farming and people’s communes in 1958. The walls survived the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and when Deng Xiaoping instituted the Household Responsibility System (HRS) in 1978 as part of his “opening up” reforms, the walls were still there, as well. The HRS marked an end to collective agriculture in rural China, and ushered in a new era of land-use rights, although not ownership, for individual families. And when that happened, the walls helped villagers in Meiqiu go back to using the land that was legally theirs a quarter of a century earlier.

  Yet, every paper issued after 1953 also made it plain that the government owned the land and the villagers were simply leasing it, usually for a period of fifty years. One paper said the lessee must give 3.25 yuan to the village and fifty-four kilograms of grain to the nation each year for the right to use the land.

  *

  Not everyone in Meiqiu had been as lucky as Wang Libo, who had taken advantage of his bundle of documents to seal a deal with local government officials for the family acreage inside the Red Line. Many people had not yet received any payout, and without that they couldn’t build new houses or contemplate the next phase of their lives. In fact, there was two hundred mu of contested land still to be settled, and for several villagers, proving they were among the rightful owners of that land was their last chance to cash in on Project 791.

  There were three unique claims to the disputed land. Some argued that it was in fact collectively owned, that it hadn’t been used until the village reclaimed it at the launch of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958. They said the profits from this land should be evenly distributed between the families who were able to present a Meiqiu hukou, the official household registration certificate. There was also a small group of Meiqiu villagers, ancestors of residents of Cangdao – the nearby village that had been ransacked by the Japanese during the Second World War – who said a large chunk of this acreage was privately owned, and they had the tattered paperwork to prove it. And finally, there was Wang Puhua, a Meiqiu resident born in 1950 who was a vocal supporter of the group arguing that the land was collectively owned. He also had a distinct assertion of his own: surrounded by the village’s land were three mu owned by him, and him only.

  “My family rented this land before 1958, and I have rented this land since the new land reform in 1978,” Wang Puhua said. “If I say this land doesn’t belong to me, who else does it belong to? I still have the certificate for this three mu of land.”

  There was a rub, however. Mission Hills had already paid someone for the land. Naturally, Mission Hills was arguing that they could do what they wanted with the property; contracts had been signed, money had traded hands and the land was rightfully theirs. But who had the money? Wang Puhua knew he didn’t.

  The developers had given money to local government officials exp
ecting the cash would reach the proper parties. Everyone, including the villagers, was in agreement about this one fact – it was how things were done in China. But money for more than half of the contested land was unaccounted for. Some thought the Yongxing town government had the money. Some thought Xiuying district government had it. Others thought neighboring Longhua district had it, since it too was claiming ownership of part of the land. How could this happen? One villager summed it up bluntly: “Our government is disorganized.”

  The money for the other part of the land in question, some ninety to one hundred mu, had been tracked down. It had been paid to the Cangdao ancestors, of whom Wang Libo was one. Wang had never really identified as being from Cangdao. He was born in Meiqiu. He lived his whole life in Meiqiu. Almost all of his friends were from Meiqiu. In 1999, his fellow villagers even nominated him to be Meiqiu’s governor (an honor he declined). But now he was labeled an outsider, because two groups of people claimed ownership over a rocky and weedy plot of land that no one really cared about until a year earlier, and some of them had been left empty-handed.

  Wang Libo believed the contested land belonged to about ten individual farmers, all of whom happened to have ancestors from Cangdao. He said the old documents supported this claim, and that it was those ten farmers who had tended fruit trees on the land over the past several decades. Wang Puhua and others in Meiqiu – many who had yet to see any financial gains from Project 791 – disagreed.

  The dispute built another wall, a figurative one, that cut right down the middle of a once tight-knit community. “Wang Libo is divided from us – and he has good guanxi with the government,” Wang Puhua said, noting that Wang Libo’s cousin, Wang Liguo, was a local government official who lived in a nearby town. “He no longer belongs to Meiqiu,” Wang Puhua went on. “If the village has a meeting, he says he has no time to attend. If something good happens to him, he won’t invite the rest of us to celebrate together. You see, almost all the new cement houses along the cement road are owned by old Cangdao villagers. They sold a lot of land and have enough money to build these big new houses.”

  Wang Libo didn’t feel comfortable discussing the conflict, but he did admit he had stopped going to village meetings because he no longer felt welcome there. “Some villagers act very cold toward me,” he said. “Especially some stubborn old men. They never say a word to me anymore.”

  All this bickering over land and money was somewhat ironic. The residents of Meiqiu had never had money to fight over before, and they never thought anyone would have any interest in their land. The soil was too rocky. They weren’t near the water. And this was Hainan – isolated, remote, backward and an afterthought for most mainlanders. Why would anyone want to buy land in this place, where life was so hard?

  In the past, if land exchanged hands it was typically from villager to villager. For example, the land Wang Libo had built his new home on was purchased by his father in the 1990s. But, up until the mid-1990s, prices remained quite low. Huangdi, or “wasteland,” could be snatched up for three thousand yuan per mu. For land with fruit trees, you’d be doing quite well if you could attract ten thousand yuan per mu, about a third of what villagers received when Mission Hills came to town.

  “We never expected such a big company to come and develop our lands,” he said.

  The former residents of Meiqiu were also split in their opinions about the big company that had arrived on their doorsteps. Their thinking largely depended on one thing, of course: whether the big company had paid for their land or not.

  “The development is of no use to us at all,” said Wang Puhua. “They took our lands without paying us. How can I say something good about them?”

  His daughter-in-law felt the same way. Having Project 791 next door – even if it was destined to be the world’s biggest collection of golf courses – was not going to change the quality of her life. “If we just continued to farm the fruit trees and reap the lychee, I think life is still okay,” she said. “If we don’t farm lands, and do something else, I think it would still be the same. We just have to change our way of making a living. That’s all.”

  Wang Boming, who managed to sell just one mu of land to Mission Hills, argued that the development was not going to be the job creator some were suggesting. “They said they would offer jobs for us villagers, but what they really gave us is only the lowest-paid and toughest jobs, like cleaners, lawn mowers, or caddies,” he said. “The management jobs are always taken away by the outsiders from other provinces.”

  A driver from the area – also named Wang, naturally – felt this way of thinking was shortsighted. “The local people are not well educated,” he said. “Why should they be put in administrative positions? We have lots of local graduates from Hainan University working for 791. It has nothing to do with discrimination against the locals, what really matters is the education issue. Some local women, they can’t read or speak Mandarin, how can we make them do something else beside cleaning?”

  He also didn’t think villagers should eschew the salaries that Mission Hills was offering – eight hundred to nine hundred yuan a month. “The company pays the insurance and pension,” he continued. “If they keep working for fifteen years, they can retire. They need to think long-term. If we add all of this together, their salary can exceed one thousand yuan per month.

  “For me, however, I won’t do these jobs. I would prefer to buy my own car and drive customers. These jobs are especially good for the illiterate women. In the long run, I am sure this place will become better and better. In the short term, people will feel pity for having lost their land. But we need to look beyond the present day.”

  Wang Libo, who at first was skeptical about Project 791, was also beginning to adopt a long view of the situation. Perhaps it was easier for him to do so, from the comfort of his new home near the cement road. “In the long run, the development will bring more opportunities to the farmers,” he said, “because many areas of wasteland on this island haven’t been used for hundreds of years. Now they are being developed, and farmers will receive compensation. Before 791 came, there was no development project, and no chance to make money. Now they have come, and we have good chance to do business. It’s better now.”

  And it was business Wang had on his mind, now that it was spring.

  There was yet another small protest taking place adjacent to his walled-off lot, just beyond the border of Mission Hills, but Wang was not interested in the demonstration today. He had seen many of those before. Instead, he focused his attention on the construction taking place on the other side of his brick wall. Buildings were going up fast, and they were huge. Wang knew he’d have to go all the way to Haikou to see anything of a similar size.

  “Hey! Friend!” Wang yelled to a shirtless worker wearing an orange hard hat, his skin glistening with sweat and as dark as Wang’s used to get when he labored as a brick layer. “What is this place?”

  “Workers’ dormitory,” the young man replied. “Ten thousand people will live here when we’re done.”

  Wang’s heart began to race. “Thanks!” he yelled back and hurriedly got back into his three-wheeled truck. He didn’t know exactly why he was so excited, but he couldn’t wait to tell his wife the news.

  *

  Rumors about a Mission Hills project in Hainan had begun to spread among those working in the China golf industry early in 2008. Details were fuzzy, but it was an open secret that the Chu family was up to something on the island, and that it was big – the family didn’t know how to do anything small. By April, twelve seemed to be the number most people were whispering. And by that they meant twelve courses.

  Then, in August, Golf Digest magazine published a series of stories about golf in China, set to coincide with the launch of the Beijing Olympics. In one piece, entitled “Golf in the Year of the Rat,” reporter John Barton wrote about some of China’s more mind-bogglingly massive golf construction projects – double-digit course layouts, once unheard of, now seemed norm
al in the country. Barton added, “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 turn the island into Asia’s Myrtle Beach.”

  In September, American irrigation systems manufacturer Lindsay Corporation included a boast in the company newsletter:

  Five Watertronics pump stations recently arrived in China. Part of the Mission Hills Hainan project, the pump stations will be used on Hainan Island, off the coast of Southern China.

  Mission Hills Hainan consists of 36 18-hole golf courses being developed during a three-year period. Watertronics revenue for this project will exceed $8,000,000…

  When completed, the project will be the world’s largest golfing complex, catering not only to the Asian market, but to “must play” golfing enthusiasts throughout the globe.

  The same developer recently completed Mission Hills Golfing Resort Complex in Shenzhen, China, across from Hong Kong. It consists of ten eighteen-hole courses and is currently the world’s largest golf course.

  Watertronics has provided pumping systems worth more than $1 million.