The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Over the course of the summer, Wang, his wife and her father built the shop with their own hands, one brick at a time. For Wang, it was like revisiting a former life – the mortar and trowel like long lost acquaintances. He didn’t miss the backbreaking work, nor was he pining particularly for more time under Hainan’s searing summer sun. But this time around, at least, he was working with his wife by his side, and what they were building was all theirs. They may have lost most of the family land, but they were establishing a new family legacy. With each brick he laid, Wang would think of one of his three children. This one is for my eldest son, Wang Jiaqiang. This one is for my youngest son, Wang Jiaxing. This one is for my only daughter, Wang Jiazhen.

  By mid-August the last brick had been cemented into place, and the entire structure received a skim coat of mortar. It was a simple building, a one-story rectangle with an open showroom and a small side room barely big enough for a single cot, where Wang often slept to stave off thieves. The ceiling and the top half of the interior walls were the only surfaces to get a coat of white paint. Everything else, including the floor, remained smooth and gray. Three cement steps led to the storefront, which was dominated by three large openings yet to be outfitted with windows and doors. From almost any angle, you could look right through the building, out the back door and window, and see the behemoths being built out back. It was hard to see exactly how many dormitories there were, but by this point they were each already seven stories high and surrounded by green mesh and bamboo scaffolding. The orange hard hats the team of construction workers wore looked like ladybugs scurrying across it.

  Wang hoped this army of workers would be his way to cash in on Project 791.

  *

  If you were flying into Haikou, approaching from the west, it was big enough that you could see it from the air. Viewed from above, the boundless swath of land didn’t look like much – fuzzy textures of green vegetation, shadowy pockets of lava rock, incongruous veins of reddish brown soil – but it was set to make history as the largest collection of golf courses in the world.

  The scope of the multi-billion-dollar project was staggering. It occupied some thirty square miles of northeast Hainan, a vast expanse of volcanic forest and shrub land the size of Hong Kong island. It wasn’t just a few dormitories being built; thousands of workers had been busy clearing trees, moving soil, building greens, fairways, clubhouses and luxury hotels. But Ken Chu was still denying its existence.

  “We, um, it’s not so much on the course development,” Chu stumbled, when asked about his company’s projects on Hainan. “Actually, we haven’t even started, we haven’t even talked about this project. It’s something in the pipeline, in discussion, but it’s not purely on golf. It’s a tourist destination.” They definitely had their eye on Hainan, he said, and the pairing was a natural fit: the island was looking to boost tourism, and Mission Hills was in the tourism business. But it was too early to say anything more than that. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said.

  But a large chunk of the project was already nearing completion. Six golf courses were shaped and seeded, with little more left to do than wait for the grass to grow. Three more courses – including the showpiece Blackstone Course – were even further along. They looked perfectly playable, lush and green, with a troupe of local women wearing rattan hats the shape of Tiffany lampshades, adding the finishing touches to the white-sand bunkers.

  The resonant moans of bullfrogs in the marshland along the course’s eighteenth fairway had been replaced by the repetitive ping ping of hammers hitting metal. Chain-smoking laborers, their skin brown and weathered by the tropical sun, were plugging away at two structures that would be a dramatic backdrop to the course’s closing hole. One, a luxury hotel, was such a beautiful, brilliant white, that its grandeur made it hard to remember you were in rural Hainan, one of the ten poorest provinces in China.

  It was all utterly telegenic, and that was by design. It had been widely speculated that in a few years’ time the Mission Hills Haikou tournament course would host one of Asia’s biggest tournaments. PGA representatives had reportedly toured the Hainan facilities.

  Mission Hills was building the world’s first and only self-contained golf city. Originally, thirty-six courses had been in the plans, but some of the land deals fell through. Still, twenty-two courses – more than the number on the entire island before Mission Hills broke ground – was enough to represent every style of golf course imaginable, from links to desert, to Augusta-like perfection, as well several decidedly non-traditional designs. Picture yourself playing into a waterfall, through a cave, around a volcano or over a replica of the Great Wall. But there were also multiple “town centers” planned, each featuring luxury homes and condominiums, hotels and spas, shopping malls, and streets lined with restaurants and bars. The Chus were transforming the Hainan countryside into a new-style Chinese suburbia. No doubt it was raising the value of surrounding property, and creating thousands of jobs. But a project that was “repurposing” twenty thousand acres of open land and directly affected the lives of tens of thousands of poor rural families was bound to create some controversy.

  But there was always a way.

  After decades of missteps and false starts, the provincial government had finally announced official plans to make tourism a “pillar” of the local economy. An all-out effort was underway to create an “international tourism island” to rival popular Southeast Asian destinations like Phuket, Thailand and Bali, Indonesia. Visa restrictions would be loosened, duty-free shops opened, flight offerings expanded. The island once known as “the end of the earth” was repositioning itself as an “oriental paradise holiday resort.”

  Golf was expected to play a major role in this repositioning. According to the Hainan tourism bureau, golf tourism to the island started to pick up around 2006, after Vice Governor Chen Cheng had announced his ambitions for hundreds of courses on Hainan. Golfers from South Korea and Japan started to arrive by the planeload. Golf in Hainan – even with the travel expenses – was a bargain compared to the rates they’d pay back home. “At that time, in Haikou, you could walk into a hotel after dinner, and the golf bags would all be lined at the hotel door – tens, even a hundred of them,” said Long Weidong, chief of Hainan’s tourism bureau. “And at the courses, all the people you saw had Asian faces, but you knew they were all Korean or Japanese.”

  But would a hundred or two hundred golf courses make sense on Hainan? While most of the existing courses were fully booked during the peak winter season, the insufferable heat and relentless rains of the Hainan summer kept away all but the most dedicated or frugal golfers. Greens fees were often heavily discounted during the quiet months, but it didn’t make much difference.

  The lagging global economy was also taking a toll on business. Visitors from Korea and Japan were no longer traveling to China to play a few rounds, and while Russian tourists continued to crowd the island’s beaches, few of them were playing golf. Much of the new golf course development, including the Chus’ Mission Hills project, was not in the south, around Sanya, Hainan’s most popular resort town, but along the eastern coast, near Haikou. That was where the available land was – near villages like Meiqiu.

  Long Weidong acknowledged that the historically large outlay of money had brought “some problems” to the previously impoverished region. “The low-level officials had never seen so much money before,” he said. “At first there were no problems, but then some people just got greedy. And because of the unequal distribution of money, the farmers were not happy, so they started appealing, accusing the village officials and the town officials.”

  Long said there was also concern in the provincial government that villagers who received large payouts for land would not know how to manage the funds, given their low levels of education. “They don’t have skills besides working on the farmland – they don’t know how to do anything else,” he explained. “The government is worried they will spend all the money gambling or bu
ying cars. Maybe they’ll spend it all in three or five years. Then what are they going to do?”

  Long started golfing in 2007, shortly after he became head of the Hainan tourism bureau. He learned from books and DVDs at first, and then received lessons from some experienced golfers. When he played on the course these days, he always did so wearing long sleeves; even in Hainan, no government official wanted to be seen with a golfer’s tan.

  He did, however, admit that things on Hainan were a bit more lax than they were on the mainland. “This is a holiday island,” he said. “If you go to Beijing or Shanghai and you try to talk with the government officials about golf? Impossible.” When he traveled to Beijing, staff members at the China National Tourism Administration had told him not to say anything about playing golf. “Being an official on the mainland is different,” he said. “Even if they can play golf, they need to say they can’t. You can only admit to playing ping pong. Maybe tennis. Never golf.”

  Long, like many higher-level officials in Hainan’s government, was originally from the mainland. He preferred the political environment on the island. “Here, you play golf, nobody gives you trouble. I don’t have to be like a thief. I can just tell you I play golf. No problem.”

  Golf had long been taboo among the mainland’s senior politicians. Zhao Ziyang – the country’s premier from 1980 to 1987, and general secretary, the Communist Party’s highest-ranking official, from 1987 to 1989 – was the only top-level Party official to be relatively open about his golf habit. Zhao could regularly be found teeing it up at Beijing International Golf Club, near the famous Ming Tombs, where thirteen Chinese emperors were buried. But then, he was also often seen wearing tailored Western suits instead of the “Mao suits” preferred by most Chinese officials at the time. Zhao’s detractors branded these an example of the “bourgeois liberalizations” he was allowing to pass through China’s once airtight seal. In 1987 the New York Times had called Zhao the “dapper heir” to reform-minded Deng Xiaoping. In its article, it even noted a photo distributed by the Xinhua News Agency, China’s official government media mouthpiece, that “shows [Zhao] on the golf course wearing a white baseball cap and clutching what knowledgeable observers believe is a three-iron.” No wonder he’d been criticized by Party hard-liners. Yet Zhao had been ousted not for his golf, but for his sympathetic stance toward the student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He spent the final fifteen years of his life under house arrest (solitary and security-heavy rounds of golf were among the few things he was permitted to leave his house for).

  Ironically, when the Tiananmen protests began, Zhao had been a primary target; he was mocked by the students for his obvious love of golf. At the same time, workers angered by uncontrolled inflation were condemning the privileged lifestyles of high officials. The Beijing City Workers Union called on the Communist Party to inform the public of personal incomes and expenses of high-ranking cadres, as well as the number of real estate properties they owned. “Mr. and Mrs. Zhao Ziyang play golf every weekend,” the workers said. “Have they paid the fees? Who paid for their expenses?”

  In the quarter century since Zhao’s ousting, the world has seen no photos of prominent Chinese government officials playing golf. Today, such a photo remains taboo. When asked what would happen if newspapers were to somehow publish photos of China’s president enjoying a round of golf, one course manager predicted there would be one million new golfers in China the following day. “I think the possibility of that ever happening is zero,” said Song Liangliang, a spokesman for the China Golf Association. “Photos of Zhao Ziyang caused such public turmoil back then.”

  Clearly, though, the winds were shifting. Long said President Hu Jintao had visited the province in 2007 and listened to reports from provincial officials, and some of those reports had focused on the island’s golf industry. Premier Wen Jiabao and First Vice Premier Li Keqiang had also visited Hainan in recent years, and they too were briefed on the province’s golf ambitions. Long said Hu had even invited Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev to play golf there. Hu never played golf himself, Long was sure, but he had assigned the provincial general secretary, Wei Liucheng, and Hainan’s director of foreign affairs to play golf with the Kazakh leader. “It was public,” Long insisted. “There was even media coverage. Nursultan got a hole in one. This generation of government officials, their ideas are changing. The last generation of central government leaders, one of them said, ‘If a leading cadre plays golf, it is the same as prostitution.’ I can’t say who it was. He didn’t say it in public. But after he retired, he started to play golf.”

  Between the uncertain politics and the effects of the global financial crisis, Long sensed that talking too much about golf remained “off-message.” “We’ve dwelled on this topic too long,” he said. “What we are doing is tourism, and Hainan’s tourism resources are, first, our tropical climate and the sea. Second, our volcano culture and ancient villages. And third, our virgin rain forests.”

  Golf was conspicuously absent from Long’s list. Why, then, so much focus on golf in Hainan? Why all the new courses? Because in China the number of golf courses built has very little to do with the number of golfers available to play on them. With few exceptions, golf courses were being built not to profit from greens fees, but to help sell luxury villas. Developers were not terribly concerned if a golf course sat empty, as long as the properties along it sold. And in Hainan, selling homes had not been a problem. Wealthy bosses from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and central China’s coal belt were sweeping up villas, sometimes several at a time, often paying in cash. The rich were looking for safe investments, and they felt real estate of this sort fit the bill.

  Being able to say you owned a home on a golf course in Hainan was about prestige, about face. “It is all about selling vacation houses and having them full three to four months of the year,” explained Richard Mon, then vice president of China operations for Schmidt-Curley Golf Design, the firm behind the Mission Hills project. “Three years ago, everyone you talked to was, ‘I want to build the best golf course in China!’ Now there are a lot more developers out there saying this golf course is an amenity to my project. It is not my project; it is a part of it. It is as important as the swimming pool. It is as important as the hotel. It just happens to take up a lot more space.”

  Mission Hills’ development primarily occupied acreage that the government had classified as huangdi, or wasteland. But the designation didn’t take into account the land’s ecological merits. “If they only build on true wasteland, then there is no problem,” said one conservationist active in Hainan. “To me, the [Mission Hills] area next to Haikou is not a ‘wasteland.’ In Hong Kong, that would be a country park, a very nice forest or wilderness park. Whenever we fly from Hong Kong we say it almost looks like Botswana or something. It is so nice, just a plain of green with some pools and ponds.”

  The northern section of Mission Hills was less than thirty minutes by car from downtown Haikou, and just east of the national geological park built around the extinct volcano crater. Nearly three years earlier, a Haikou-based NGO believed it had secured around 825 acres of this land to establish a forest park that would help promote environmental awareness. It had worked for two years toward this goal, getting the support of the government, attracting investors and brokering a land deal with the local villagers. But suddenly, the villagers had cut off communication. And that was when the NGO’s organizers first learned about Project 791.

  “They didn’t even notify us,” the head of the NGO remembered over a pot of pu’er tea. “The government just told the villagers not to work with us anymore. All the years working, the money, the energy, all wasted. It was a devastating hit. It broke our hearts, and we felt so small and insignificant. We knew we could never defeat them. How can you go against the government?” He paused, then added, “I have been an environmentalist in Hainan for eight years. I am tired. I am exhausted.”

  The NGO was warned not to do anything tha
t might disrupt the Mission Hills project, and it had to oblige. Throughout China, a domestic NGO is never truly nongovernmental. A good relationship with the government is necessary for survival, and going up against golf – an industry that was lining the pockets of many a local government official – would not be a wise move.

  “The government is always on the same side as business guys,” the NGO director said. “It would be impossible for us to do anything to try to stop this. It’s the government’s thing, and they do it in secret. They give the project a code name. They call it ecological restoration. Sure, they might plant a few trees, but they also destroyed a mountain and turned it into a lake. They call this ecological restoration?”

  At times, even Martin Moore’s construction team couldn’t believe the ambition of the project. One employee wrote the following in a company newsletter: “It is hard to imagine that every square meter beneath the growing grass on the current twelve courses under construction, lays a solid layer of volcanic rock. Nothing more, just rock, rock, rock. More than ten million cubic meters of topsoil has been imported from off site. More than one hundred rock breakers, along with dozens of drilling rigs and dynamite teams, face the huge challenge of keeping the project moving forward. Almost all mass excavation requires blasting and rock breaking, all drainage and irrigation trenches have to be excavated with rock breakers, even the cart paths are made of crushed lava rock. The magnitude of this construction process is simply incredible.”

  *

  Wang Libo and his wife were exhausted from their summer of hard labor, but they were anxious to start the new chapter in their lives. They had decided to open their new business immediately. Windows and doors – not to mention electricity – could wait. So on Tuesday, August 25, 2009, they became shopkeepers. There was no fanfare, no banners, balloons or strings of multicolored triangular pennants. The shop didn’t even have a name. They shouted over the wall to the workers on the “secret” construction site next door and told them they were open. Word gradually spread.