The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Contractors would also bump up their margins on the front end (and constantly look for ways to cut corners during the job) because they knew they were likely going to get stiffed on the back end by the developer, sometimes by 25 percent or more. “You ask any contractor,” Martin Moore said. “If they sign a contract for six million dollars, he’ll be the first to tell you that if he gets 75 percent of that money when he’s completely done, then he’s happy.”

  So Martin started writing into his contracts that four months’ worth of the agreed work must be paid in advance. In return, he wouldn’t bill his clients for the last four months of service. The more money up front, the better, as far as Martin was concerned. And few clients tried to renegotiate those terms. “My concern is that I’ve gotten stiffed a few times over the last three or four years, and I want to always be ahead of these guys,” Martin said. “I’m more willing to negotiate my fee down if I can have more up front.”

  While Martin had become fluent in Chinese contract negotiations, he wasn’t fluent in the Chinese language. In fact, it was rare for anyone with any experience overseeing a golf course construction site to have “proficient in Mandarin Chinese” on his resumé. Early on, Martin’s project managers would rely on translators provided by the developer for basic communication, but the inherent conflict of interest in that relationship meant Martin’s team rarely got the full story. “On one of our early jobs,” Martin recalled, “I turned to the translator and said, ‘Hey, tell that guy, bullshit. We’re not doing that.’ And the guy said to me, ‘I can’t tell him that. I work for him.’ And that’s when we learned.” They would end up having little knowledge of what was going on beyond plain sight. It also made it nearly impossible for Martin to communicate, at times.

  Since that experience, Martin had made sure to have a “project coordinator” on the payroll for every job. This person was always local and fluent in Mandarin, English and perhaps a couple other Chinese dialects, but the job description varied from place to place. Often the project coordinator was part translator, part fly-on-the-wall, part guanxi envoy. “I wanna say 25 percent of their job is translating,” Martin said. “The most important job that they fucking have is listen, hear, understand all the shit that’s going on behind the scenes, the politics, and bring that to our project manager’s attention.” It was an extra six thousand yuan (one thousand dollars) a month per project out of Martin’s pocket, but what these project coordinators provided was invaluable. Martin remembered one project coordinator who was “lazy” and “couldn’t do anything else worth a crap,” but he earned his keep because of his excellent skills at entertaining clients. He was a fantastic karaoke singer, and could hold his liquor. These are skills hard to place a value on in China – especially if his American boss had never managed to acquire a taste for baijiu. Martin had learned to strategize his baijiu consumption. “I don’t mind saying no, but if it’s with a client or prospect or something, I’m going to drink it,” Martin said. “I’ll pay for it the next day.” And there was one “trick” he no longer fell for. Often, he said, when he was the only foreigner in the room, each person would approach him individually and offer to do a shot with him. “I stop that right off the bat,” Martin said. “I say, ‘No, this ain’t ten against one here guys.’ I say, ‘If I’m drinking, we’re all drinking.’”

  Ninety-five percent of achieving success in China, Martin thought, came down to learning how to navigate the Byzantine world of local Chinese politics. And that was a matter of managing relationships and making smart local hires.

  ‌11

  ‌The Golf Police

  Wang Libo often wondered what his life would have been like if Project 791’s Red Line had not been moved; had he not been able to keep the sliver of land outside the Mission Hills worker dormitories and open up his shop. Leaving Hainan was something he and his wife had never considered. Not even in their wildest dreams. “I don’t know the best places to visit,” Wang’s wife said. “I don’t speak Mandarin well, and I wouldn’t know the way to go, if I go to other places. Anyway, I have no money or time to travel.”

  Wang supposed he would have continued driving his san lun che back and forth between Yongxing and Xiuying every day. And he figured his wife would have found some other way to earn money. They would have sorted it out somehow, he thought. They were survivors.

  Thankfully, they hadn’t been forced to make do. While business at Wang’s still-nameless convenience store was not brisk, he had a steady stream of customers. Thousands of migrants had taken construction jobs at the world’s largest golf complex next door. Wang and his wife weren’t getting rich, but they were doing well enough to be able to grow their inventory each week. The once empty showroom, now hooked up to electricity, was filling up.

  Their days were filling up, too, so much so that Wang barely had time to lament the loss of his land and his fruit trees. His feelings about the forced land sales appeared to be evolving.

  “Farming is tiring and tough,” Wang said. “We don’t miss it. Before 791, most people went outside to find jobs. Fruit trees bear fruit only once a year and harvests can vary greatly depending on the weather. We had to think about our kids and future grandkids. Our generation and my father’s generation had been living a much harder life – not enough food or clothing. Now the developer comes, and we have money to start new businesses and make more money and lead a better life. Someone who sticks to the land and passes the land to future generations will still be living a hard life, while the villagers who sold land have already built their new cement houses.”

  Of course, only one Meiqiu villager owned the plot of land that just happened to be right outside the entrance to the buildings that would soon house ten thousand people. The fluky nature of this good fortune was not lost on Wang, who admitted his location was “convenient.”

  “But I am not the only lucky one,” Wang protested. “All the villagers along the road are lucky dogs.”

  Not all of the village’s residents were feeling quite so charmed, however. It had been more than a year since Wang Puhua had taken the case over the contested land to the Xiuying district court. He had yet to hear a thing. “If I complain, the government doesn’t respond to it at all,” he said. “They have taken the money and split it up among different levels of officials. They are corrupt.”

  Things came to a head on November 10, 2009, two years after the land sales began in earnest. The disputed land had largely been left alone, but the bulldozers were approaching. Villagers could see them, orange and yellow, like several fierce suns growing bigger and bigger on the horizon each day. The people of Meiqiu still waiting for their first taste of Mission Hills cash decided they had to protect the land they insisted was collectively owned.

  They started with a stakeout. Working in shifts, they made sure one of them was watching the land at all times. They’d act as though they were working in the fields, chopping wood or cutting branches, as they kept up their surveillance surreptitiously.

  “How can we tolerate the developer leveling our lands without any payment?” Wang Puhua asked. “We are not stupid.”

  Then, on the sixth day of their vigil, early in the morning, it happened. Three bulldozers encroached on the contested land. The farmer who saw it happen quickly called the new village governor, who went door to door, rounding everyone up. Some hopped on motorbikes, others chose to run. Before long, some two dozen villagers arrived on the scene – and found they were not alone.

  Ten police officers were already there, awaiting their arrival. Soon the number swelled to nearly a hundred, a mixture of armed police, Mission Hills security and a large contingent of chengguan, a somewhat thuggish element of China’s public security apparatus. “They knew we were coming,” Wang Puhua said.

  Wang said some villagers came directly from the fields and therefore carried a variety of farming tools with them, some of which looked more threatening than others. They had no intention of using them, of course, and any onlooker to this face
-off could tell which side was the underdog. The villagers were a ragtag lot, mostly middle-aged or older, half of them women, but they didn’t back down from the bulldozer-backed brigade of young and uniformed men before them. They formed a human shield between their land and the bulldozers. The women stood in front, in an effort to dissuade the security team from using force.

  It was uncommonly hot and humid for November, with morning temperatures already approaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two Celsius), and the burning sun made the tense situation even hotter. Reddening faces simmered under beads of sweat, and it seemed things could boil over at any moment.

  “We yelled at them, even cursed at them. However, they never listened to us,” Wang Puhua said. “We did nothing to them, just persuaded them that this land belongs to us. Any development without payment is wrong. We had to try to stop them.”

  While the shouting continued, the bulldozer drivers cut their engines and waited – it was clear they had been in situations like this before. “If villagers come to us and want us to stop,” explained a driver who had confronted similar village protests, “we just stop and call the developer and ask them to deal with the situation. We just listen for the boss’s order. We understand where the villagers are coming from. Their lands were rented with little compensation, sometimes none, and they have the right to defend their lands. It is their job to defend their lands, just like it is our job to follow the boss’s order to drive our bulldozers. But at the same time, the developer has already paid for all the land. Why can’t they bulldoze it, if that is what they want to do?”

  Not everyone at Meiqiu that day was quite so level-headed. One of the chengguan spotted a knife in the hand of a farmer, a man in his sixties, and demanded he turn it over. “It’s for cutting twigs!” the villagers shouted. “To feed the goats!” The chengguan didn’t pay them any mind. He tried to grab the knife, slicing his hand in the process. The blood changed everything.

  “The security guard beat the old man,” said Wang Boming, another villager who was there that day.

  The protest escalated quickly. The villagers were incensed, and vowed to stand their ground. But then came the tear gas, and the crowd was forced to scatter. Some chengguan used their hands to smear a pepper-spray-like substance on the faces of some of the slower villagers, who were mostly women. They removed the last stragglers from the field by force.

  There were no more protests after that. “Our village is so small,” lamented Wang Puhua’s daughter-in-law, who sustained minor injuries in the scuffle with the security forces. “We don’t have enough people. We can’t persuade the government, and we can’t fight back because we lack people. What can we do? Nothing. Once the government decides to press on you, you have no way out.”

  Once he was sure everyone had returned to the village, Wang Puhua grabbed his camera and started documenting all of the cuts, bruises and items of ripped clothing they had sustained. He wrote everything down, logging each offense in great detail, and added the papers to his ever-growing pile of documents for the court cases.

  The land was bulldozed the following day.

  *

  In late November 2009, when various ministries of the Chinese government held a press conference to announce their most recent crackdown on illegal land use, five specific investigations were highlighted as among those that would receive “harsh punishment.” Three involved heavy industry: a coking plant, a plastics factory and a rare earth metals mine. The other two alleged offenders were golf courses, and they got all the international headlines. “Golf defies rules to gain ground,” proclaimed China Daily. The Associated Press followed suit: “China vows crackdown on illegal golf courses.”

  Martin Moore brushed it off as just another in a series of toothless threats from Beijing. His China business was better than it had ever been. Since 2004, the year the central government had instituted its nationwide moratorium on golf course construction, some four hundred new courses had opened their gates. Almost all the nation’s six hundred or so golf courses were technically illegal in some way. Back in October, the International Olympic Committee had announced that golf would be a part of the Summer Games for the first time in more than one hundred years, returning in 2016 at Rio de Janeiro. Many people expected golf’s new Olympic status would lead to newfound legitimacy for the sport in medal-crazy China.

  But then the government brought out the heavy equipment. Then they started digging up fairways.

  The bulldozers arrived at dawn on a Friday in early December. There were more than a dozen of them lined up outside the clock-tower gate of the Anji King Valley Country Club, located in Zhejiang province, 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. The convoy drove into the compound, past the fountain and the bronze mounted knight, past the grand Tudor-style clubhouse, to the multi-million-dollar eighteen-hole golf course that had been open for little more than a year and was scheduled to host a Ladies European Tour event the following autumn. For ten days the excavators ate up the fairways, ripping up turf and snapping irrigation pipes buried in the soil. There were no signs of gophers, but it was a demolition that would have made Carl Spackler proud.

  On the surface, the government’s reasons for the destruction were simple. King Valley, it claimed, was occupying more than a quarter of its picturesque four-hundred-acre plot illegally. Nearly thirty-five acres of the illegal property was farmland, the officials said, and that was an increasingly precious commodity in a country that had to feed 21 percent of the world’s population with less than 8 percent of its arable land.

  Since 1996, China had lost more than thirty thousand square miles of arable land, and its total of around 470,000 square miles was getting dangerously close to the 463,323-square-mile baseline the government said was necessary for sustaining the country’s massive population. While China’s ability to feed itself had been improving dramatically – the government was claiming better than 95 percent self-sufficiency in grain, which had experienced record-setting yields in recent years – the United Nations still classified around 100 million Chinese as “undernourished.” Land grabs were a plague on the countryside; China reported 42,000 cases of illegal land use in 2009. Even though golf-related construction accounted for a tiny fraction of that total, the “rich man’s game” remained an easy target for the authorities in a nation with some 700 million poor farmers.

  Ironically, the Chinese government’s reluctance to embrace golf, or at least come up with a realistic set of regulations to slow and standardize its inevitable growth, was exactly what had allowed things to get out of control. At this point, Beijing didn’t even know how many golf courses existed within the country’s borders. At the press conference in November 2009, Ministry of Land and Resources officials said they were using satellite imagery to try to get a handle on the number. Back in 2004, when the moratorium had been announced, state media reported that only ten of China’s then 176 known golf courses had received proper approvals from the central government.

  “Right now the market is just in chaos,” said one golf developer. “This local bureau approves a golf course. Some other local bureau says they can also approve a golf course. Nobody actually has the right to do it, but everybody is doing it.”

  This was precisely the case in Anji county, home of King Valley Country Club. Anji had always been one of the poorer counties in Zhejiang – its lone claim to fame, and most precious natural resource, was its 150,000 acres of bamboo forest (featured in the climactic fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The area’s top government official was fond of telling people he had two dreams for Anji: a university and a golf course. Ask anyone in Jianshan village, where that second dream came to fruition, and they’ll tell you the King Valley golf course was a pet project of the local government, designed to attract well-heeled patrons from Hangzhou and Shanghai to the impoverished countryside and stimulate the local economy.

  A King Valley membership may have cost upwards of 340,000 yuan ($50,000), but there were many signs of the a
rea’s historically simple way of life outside the club’s fences. In the creek separating the golf course grounds from Jianshan, local women rinsed their laundry and men herded flocks of ducks upstream using long bamboo poles. The people often still referred to their “production teams,” a holdover term from the pre-reform days of China’s communal farming system.

  In the village, there were also many indications of growth, such as eco-friendly demonstration homes and small factories manufacturing decorative bamboo wall-coverings. Rickety blue trucks rumbled continuously along the road, overloaded with bamboo in various stages of production: bundles of logs, planks, slats and items ready for market. Further down the street, townhouses and apartment complexes were under construction, their brick and concrete frames covered in bamboo scaffolding. Across from one such site were the stone buildings that make up Jianshan Farmhouse, a kitschy, revolution-themed restaurant and lodge with framed portraits of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx and other Communist all-stars displayed outside its guest rooms. All this development had happened after construction on King Valley began in 2005.

  “Our village committee got rich by relying on this golf course,” said an old man at the brand-new community center next door to Jianshan Farmhouse. “We used to live on the golf course – three production teams have been moved here. More than one hundred new houses. Without the golf development, how could we afford to build these houses?”

  At the community center, a mural on a large outdoor wall just beyond a basketball court read, in bold letters:

  Three core objectives of creating “beautiful countryside” in Jianshan Village: