by Dan Washburn
There was no more conspicuous a golf project on the planet, but Ken Chu still insisted all those involved treated it as “top secret.” The Chinese have a saying about unwanted attention: “Man should fear fame like pigs fear getting fat.” No developer wanted their golf course to become the fat pig – the project that drew the eye, and the ire, of Beijing – and was put up for slaughter. One member of the design team tried to explain this “if you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist” mentality. “They don’t want to create any more stir,” he said. “The last thing they want is Beijing saying, ‘What are you doing, building this many golf courses down here?’ It’s like, ‘You might already know, but I’m never going to tell you.’ That’s what they have to do. That’s the game in China.”
As Ken stepped more to the fore, his father, David, became increasingly reclusive. According to Martin, it was hard to “get anywhere near that guy,” though he was managing the construction of fifteen courses for the family business. Even back in 2002 and 2003, when Martin was building the five Mission Hills courses in Shenzhen, right in the eldest Chu’s backyard, it was always an adventure going to see him. Usually, Ken would summon Martin for an audience. “My father would like to talk to you,” he’d say, and what would follow would be like something out of a James Bond film. David’s office was hidden in a high-security compound, protected by a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints. Martin recalled being escorted through “dungeon doors” that weighed “about ten thousand pounds each.” Then he’d be asked to wait in a holding room until the patriarch was ready to see him. During the Haikou job, Martin saw and shook hands with David just once.
There were stories about David Chu using an elaborate series of decoys and car switches before boarding flights out of Hong Kong. No one knew whether these stories were accurate, of course, but such tales and others like them flourished, adding to the mystique surrounding the family. Call it extreme caution, or call it paranoia, some of it seemed to have been passed down to Ken. Like father, like son.
Mission Hills was now renowned for its formidable security staff – hundreds of highly trained young men, each a physical specimen, the equivalent of a small army. Early each morning you could hear them running through a workout regimen and tackling obstacle courses. A few times each year, at staff parties, the security team would wow the crowd with demonstrations of combat techniques and gymnastics that were at once thrilling and intimidating. The Mission Hills security detail was also famous for its canine contingent, a hundred or so police-trained purebred German Shepherd dogs imported from the United States. “When they say ‘attack,’ they attack,” Martin said. “My staff used to complain that those dogs lived better than they did.”
Workers at the Mission Hills project in Hainan said Ken would fly down to visit the site twice a month. His visits would rarely last more than a day, but always made an impression. He would be driven around the complex in a black car with tinted windows, a sizable entourage in tow. The full motorcade typically counted four cars flanked at each corner by a security guard on a motorbike. “It was like you’d see for the president of the United States,” one observer said. At tournaments, Ken would be surrounded by a “fleet of golf buggies” – anywhere from six to twelve carts carrying a variety of security, public relations and other random personnel – tasked with following his every move. “It was excessive, kind of comical, actually,” one worker recalled, saying the commotion was all part of “the image.” This Mission Hills insider also felt the Chus’ “unnecessary secrecy” and the over-the-top security helped to stew impressions that “maybe there is more that we don’t know.”
The worker wasn’t alone. A journalist working on a routine story about the Chu family was delayed for months because Mission Hills went silent during the fact-checking process, stalling on basic details regarding the company’s timeline, even the birth dates of key figures. “It was insane,” the reporter said. “It was just a mystery what happened. They just wouldn’t talk about anything.” The impression the reporter was left with, valid or not, was that Mission Hills had something to hide, thus casting a shadow on the rest of the company’s story, much of which seemed positive and a true embodiment of the Chinese Dream. “They really bring it on themselves,” the journalist said. “There’s a difference between secretive and cautious. Acting like everything is so secret is just a mistake.”
Some secrets are harder to keep than others, especially if they occupy thirty-nine square miles of land – just shy of 25,000 acres. That was the size of the original Hainan plot Mission Hills was attached to, when David Chu settled on thirty-six courses, seemingly at random, according to those who worked on the project from the beginning. “Good feng shui, I don’t know,” offered one baffled member of the design team. “And they were looking to get more land. Basically it was, ‘How much can you give me?’”
And Mission Hills was not alone. All sorts of conglomerates, both state-owned and private, including the China Poly Group and Hainan Airlines Group, were bolstering their real estate portfolios, snatching up large patches of land left and right, with a special focus on Hainan. “It’s all about the land grab right now,” acknowledged one golf design professional.
It would be difficult for local government officials to feign ignorance of the world’s largest golf construction project happening on their island. In addition to negotiating the land purchases from the villages, Hainan government had a monopoly on the sale of sand on the island, and golf courses use a lot of sand. “You ain’t getting it unless you go through the government,” Martin explained. “They’ve claimed all rights to it. If you’re going to pull your truck down there and set up operations and pull out of there, the government’s going to be involved.”
The master plan for Mission Hills Haikou called for twenty-two courses on the northern part of the property, close to the airport, and fourteen down south. But from early on, it was clear some courses were a higher priority than others. The original plan to start all of the courses simultaneously evaporated, and Martin’s crew was told to focus on the northern tract while Chinese laborers toiled in the south.
Before long, some of the planned courses quietly evaporated, too. Twenty-two, not thirty-six, became the number the crew discussed internally. Dust-ups over land put the entire southern part of the project on hold, even though irrigation was laid for a number of courses there, and parts of two courses were completely grassed. Workers were told to let those two courses grow over.
That a project originally intended to cover such a huge acreage encountered problems related to land disputes surprised hardly anyone. It made sense that a monster undertaking like Mission Hills Haikou, at roughly fifty times the size of the average residential golf course project, had at least fifty times the amount of border disputes. Workers said protesters appeared on the construction site “countless times.”
“They always come out with their machetes,” one American staffer said. “There’ll be thirty little women and they’ll all start screaming Hainanese and shaking their machetes and yelling at you. It’s always about money. It’s always about getting paid. They’re never violent. They never do anything. They know that that would just be tragic. They’d probably get shot or something. But anytime that happens, we’ll just leave that area.”
The worker said it was shocking to come from the United States, where land deals are so “cut and dry,” to China, where everything is “muddled.” He said the property lines of the Mission Hills project had changed “hundreds” of times.
Sometimes boundaries changed as the result of ongoing government negotiations with the villagers, and other times due to certain pieces of land, seemingly at random, being designated farmland, and therefore off-limits for development. “They wouldn’t even let anyone farm there, and anyway it was nothing but lava rock,” Martin said, perplexed. “Just some imaginary line the government came up with.”
Mission Hills’ marquee championship course was affected by such a designation
. All eighteen holes of what’s now known as the Blackstone Course were completely finished and playable, and then it was determined that parts of three holes – Nos. 16, 17 and 18 – were built on land that was suddenly considered farmland. Ken Chu negotiated with the local government for close to three months, and then one day, after talks broke down, he came to the site and told Martin’s team to completely re-route the holes to accommodate the new property line. He demanded a new design be ready by the following day.
“They were great holes, with a lake,” Martin said. “The next day we had thirty-two excavators in there completely ripping it all up, irrigation and everything.”
A group of high-level local government officials came out that day, as well. They urged the workers to stop, saying they were so close to striking a deal. But Ken wasn’t interested in waiting any longer. And he didn’t want to make a deal now only to have it blow up on him in a year or two. That was smart. Farmland – or at least land that was being called “farmland” by the government on this particular day – was off-limits, and he didn’t want any part of it.
“We ripped up many, many courses,” Martin said. He estimates they built two entire courses’ worth of extra holes just trying to keep up with the property’s protean borders. “This new farmland concept is definitely coming into play,” Martin said. “Every time a new plan comes out with new farmland boundaries, we’re moving holes left and right.”
Other alterations had nothing to do with villagers or government officials. They were more about knowing your audience. One of the courses at Mission Hills Haikou was inspired by the classic American courses of the early 1900s, known by some as the “golden age” of golf course design. An architectural feature common during that era was artificial mounds of earth, often many of them, known as “chocolate drops.” Designer Brian Curley had positioned several of these chocolate drops throughout the vintage course, and when Ken Chu first laid eyes on the mounds he loved them, and ordered more. For the next three months, Martin’s team added “loads of dirt” to the fairways, adorning the course with the humps and bumps their boss had requested.
One month after the course started receiving visitors, Ken updated his request.
“Take every one of those mounds out,” he ordered. “Take them all out!”
Apparently, 90 percent of the Chinese who saw the course thought the mounds looked like graves.
But the delays and dust-ups were mere sideshows to the main event – the largest golf course construction project in history.
“The Mission Hills one on Hainan still kind of amazes me – boggles my mind,” said a project manager for a different course under construction on the island. “The scope of the project is larger than the city of Haikou. One guy I know who lives there at the complex has to drive an hour and a half just to get to the part of the site where he works.”
By the spring of 2009 there were a dozen golf courses under construction simultaneously. There were more than five hundred pieces of heavy machinery on site. From a distance, it looked a bit like Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs roaming the earth, it was giant excavators and rock hammers. And because the entire complex was being built on thick volcanic rock, drilling rigs and dynamite teams were always on call. “This much equipment on a golf site is not normal – not remotely normal,” one American worker said, noting that a typical eighteen-hole project would have about 1 percent the amount of machinery. To keep up with the demands of construction, the Chus built their own concrete factory on site, with fifteen cement mixing trucks working exclusively for them.
More than 350 million cubic feet of topsoil, enough to fill London’s Wembley Stadium nine times, was brought in from an offsite location by a caravan of more than six hundred dump trucks running twenty hours a day. “They bought a mountain… and they basically cut it thirty meters down and turned it into a lake,” an American worker at the site said.
While certain species of trees and shrubs thrived on the volcanic landscape, the rocky earth was not suitable for most forms of farming, nor was it suitable for building and shaping golf courses, which require a couple meters of moldable topsoil. Mission Hills bought a mountain, a small one about five miles from the construction site, and started digging – until the mountain was a hole in the ground. Those six hundred dump trucks ping-ponged between the two sites, transporting the mountain’s red earth to the construction site, where it was stored in a huge flat pile that looked like an Arizona plateau.
9
Homecomings
Zhou Xunshu was watching television, and he was crying, moved to tears by a show called National Models of Virtue, which, according to an AFP write-up, honored “53 people who were selected by a pool of 21 million voters for their superiority in the five categories of altruism, bravery for a just cause, honesty and confidence, hard work and filial piety.”
The show, Zhou said, made him think about his parents. “I really need to get them out of the village,” he said at the time. “Some day, I am going to move them to Chongqing.”
When that day came, it was the eve of the Beijing Summer Olympics – and his parents did not yet know that they were about to be relocated.
*
Salaxi was the last town before the ascent to Qixin. There, Zhou and Fifth Brother and Fifth Brother’s girlfriend, who also lived in Chongqing, had made plans to meet Third Brother. At an outdoor market, they each bought a pair of canvas “liberation shoes.” Cheap and sturdy, with reinforced rubber toes and cleated soles, they are the footwear of choice – or perhaps lack of choice – for blue-collar workers in China. That they were wearing them could mean only one thing: they were walking up the mountain to Qixin. Recent rains had made the road to the village impassable.
“We need to hurry,” Zhou said. “It’s getting dark, and the route is slippery.”
Zhou did not carry any bags, no change of clothes. As a child he had hiked this route every day, his back either loaded with schoolbooks or a delivery of coal. He thought it would take about two hours.
The mountain had been transformed by the summer. What was once brown and barren now felt like a rainforest, green and overgrown. Lush terraces overflowed with corn stalks that towered over their tenders. Every person along the route was burdened with a heavy load of some kind of crop, be it potatoes, garlic, walnuts or corn.
“There’s going to be a good harvest this year,” Zhou observed. “Good weather, enough rain. The crops are growing so well now.”
A steep incline through a bamboo forest led to an opening in the side of a tall, gray rock face. It was a proper tunnel, albeit slightly small, and with no lighting. The brothers pulled out flashlights and mobile phones to illuminate the path. There was no light at the end of the tunnel – it was more than half a mile long – and the further you walked, the smaller it got. Walls, once smooth and expertly arched, were now irregular and riddled with chisel marks.
“Nothing gets finished around here,” Zhou sighed, as he emerged from the tunnel into a stunning verdant valley. Dark silhouettes of jagged hills loomed like shadow puppets in the distance.
It started to rain. The group walked alongside a stream, and then, as the water flowed higher, in the stream. The liberation shoes were soon soaked and struggling to find traction.
“It’s a tough journey!” Third Brother yelled from the darkness.
And then, a light played like a firefly in the distance; then two, three, four. The faint barking of a dog came next. With each step, the village slowly took shape out of the night.
Zhou’s father was waiting for them in front of the house. “Such a hard and tough journey,” he said of the hike he no doubt had made a thousand times himself. “Come and sit. Drink some tea. Dinner is almost ready.” Everyone gathered around the huolu, and watched the tea kettle boil.
Several minutes later, Zhou’s mother emerged from a back room. She shuffled delicately and awkwardly, leaning heavily on a bamboo walking stick. She was in obvious pain, but smiled at the sight of he
r family filling the room. Zhou watched his mom struggle to take her seat. He shook his head. He held back tears. This is why we are taking them back to Chongqing, he thought.
Zhou brushed a fly off his shirt, but two more took its place. They were swarming. A couple dozen of them, little winged magnets, clung to the exhaust pipe extending from the huolu, and the insects seemed especially attracted to their guests from Chongqing. It was the shirts – they were the brightest things in all of Qixin. Zhou wore a white Nike quick-dry shirt, and Fifth Brother a white-and-red-striped Nike golf shirt with a red collar to go with his white golf trousers. His girlfriend’s ladies golf top was hot pink with a deep neckline. Aside from a few specks of mud, their shirts looked clean and new – three brilliant lights in the monochrome room. Zhou brushed off fly after fly from the front of his shirt, unaware of the colony that was forming on his back. His parents, by contrast, wore drab suits, the same as they had been wearing back in the winter. They melted into the room’s gray interior. When a fly landed on them, they simply waited for it to fly away.
“Let’s eat!” Zhou said abruptly.
“Let’s drink!” Fifth Brother said with a nervous chuckle. First Brother would have usually been the one to get the drinking started, but he was off building a tunnel.
Zhou, his parents, Third Brother, Fifth Brother, Fifth Brother’s girlfriend and two neighbor boys who helped out the family in the fields walked to the cinderblock structure adjacent to Zhou’s parents’ house and crowded around a rectangular table. First Brother’s wife served the food. The dishes looked familiar: Various combinations of local tofu, potatoes, pickled cabbage and preserved pork. Corn also made its way to the table, in the form of mijiu, a wine that Fifth Brother distributed and consumed liberally.
Zhou had made the decision to return to Qixin only a couple days before. “I always make decisions suddenly. Especially about coming back home,” he explained. “It’s just not something I can plan. But, you see, my mother fell down while working in the fields several days ago and is using a cane now. So I thought I should come back.”