10
Striking Black
Wang Libo began to build his future in May 2009. It was his wife’s idea, actually. “When we saw that the developer was building dormitories behind our land, and realized the workers living there would have no place to buy cigarettes and drinks,” Wang recalled, “my wife suggested we build a small shop to sell necessities on our land. I said yes, because now that we had rented out our fruit tree land, she was jobless.”
He estimated the shop he had in mind would cost around forty thousand yuan – a small fortune – but he didn’t hesitate before going ahead with the plan. It was a strange time in the village – never before had so many people been flush with cash. Even though he and his wife had spent all their land compensation money on building their new house, they still had some savings. Some relatives, who had also recently profited from land sales, helped them with the rest. “Before, I would have had to borrow from the rural banks, and there would have been a lot of red tape,” he said. “Now, every plan is like this. Everything is possible. If you have money, you can do it without concern.”
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 buying 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 that 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.
Offerings were sparse at first – whatever Wang could fit into his three-wheeled truck during a trip to Yongxing. Five metal shelves in the back of the shop housed most of the necessities: water, soft drinks, canned congee, eggs, instant noodles, soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, toothpaste, laundry detergent, soy sauce, and two brands of beer: Anchor and Pearl River. In front of the shelves, a small wooden desk and a glass display case where Wang kept cigarettes, nuts, seeds and a variety of prepackaged pastries. The only other piece of furniture in the mostly empty room was a large terracotta urn filled with a variety of drinks and ice trucked in from Wang’s house further down the road. Regular trips were necessary. It was late August on Hainan; nothing stayed frozen for long.
Wang’s little shop was in its second day in business. He shuffled a deck of playing cards from the chair behind his desk. “I am currently building two toilets in the back,” he said of his work in progress. “If you come back here after three years, there will be so many changes you won’t recognize this place. Even compared to two years ago, there have already been lots of changes here. Two years ago there were no buildings here. It was all mountainous wasteland and fruit trees – nothing like now.” In a few years’ time, he said, “it will be a different world.”
Wang paused from his discussion of the development of Hainan to attend to two weary workers in search of cold water. Once he’d served them, he continued. “In the future, the rich people will come to Hainan for holidays and they will live in villas and enjoy all-inclusive ‘eat-drink-and-be-merry’ packages, some even including beautiful women,” he noted. “The course will be very nice, too. It has a man-made lake and all the green grass and trees. It will be the same as in Shenzhen, but this one is even bigger than the one in Shenzhen, and better too.”
He said he’d heard about these grandiose plans from “the bosses” of the construction site. “They said developing this area will benefit us and help us get rich. There will be more people coming here, and we’ll be very busy. It’s not for the people who come here for holidays, because they’ll have their own services. It’s for the workers and the employees. They need to eat. The dormitories here will have thousands of workers living here and in the future we want to sell them things.”
He felt secure about his future, because he owned this land. The local officials had tried to wave off the protests by telling the villagers they were only renting their land to Mission Hills on a fifty-year contract. When the rental period ended, they or their children could renegotiate the terms for the land, which would be much more valuable. But Wang saw through it – and so did the other villagers. “In name, ‘rent’, but in reality, ‘buy.’ The government told us we are renting to them for fifty years, but after fifty years we will never get that land back,” he said. The developers, after all, had not signed a contract with the villagers. “They signed the contract with the government not with us farmers. So they say fifty years, who knows, after fifty years we might not even be alive. They won’t give the land back even if we are.”
He saw no point in all the protests. “As an ordinary citizen, how can you fight against the government officials?” His best bet, he thought, was to find some way to continue to profit from the project.
A car pulled into the dirt patch in front of Wang’s store. It looked new. The brand was BYD, or “Build Your Dreams,” a plucky Chinese company based in Shenzhen. A man in white shorts, a white golf shirt and flip-flops hopped out. It was Wang’s cousin, Wang Liguo, a district-level government official on the island. He said he was sure Mission Hills Haikou was going to be bigger and better than the one in Shenzhen.
“I have been to the Mission Hills in Shenzhen,” Wang Liguo stated proudly. He explained that he and around one hundred other village representatives from the area had traveled there on an all-expenses-paid trip so that they could understand the plans.
“Do you want to have a look inside?” Wang Liguo asked, motioning toward the Mission Hills property.
There seemed no way to get past the security.
“Who can stop me?” he scoffed. “Who can stop the government’s car?”
*
“I feel so gloomy these days,” Zhou Xunshu said. “I can’t find a job.” And then, with one swift twist of his wrist, he brought a fish head to the surface of the pot. Sichuan peppercorns covered its skin like barnacles. A small pool of bright red broth settled in the bottom of the ladle. Zhou dumped the whole thing into his rice bowl and began to pick it apart with his chopsticks. The surroundings matched Zhou’s mood. The neighborhood restaurant was tucked into a dark, sooty suburb near Beijing’s international airport. The kitchen workers sat shirtless at a corner table smoking cigarettes and playing cards, seemingly oblivious to the occasional cockroach scratching its way up a wall or a customer’s leg.
It was early September 2009, and Zhou was in Beijing for the China Unicom Pro-Am, an independent tournament with a large purse – 1.5 million yuan ($215,000) in total prize money – and a wacky format. During the final rounds of the event, when the Chinese professionals should be focused on competing for one of the biggest paydays of the year, they were being forced to play in groups that included inexperienced amateur golfers, usually local business people or clients of the title sponsor. These interlopers often proved to be more interested in socializing and glad-handing than playing a serious round of golf.
“I don’t know whose fucking idea this was,” Zhou fumed. “The pace is intolerable. They shoot in the hundreds. One round feels like it lasts a week. Sometimes players in the lead will lose their advantage because they are teamed with bad players. It is totally beyond understanding.”
Zhou sighed. “Chinese golf really sucks in our generation,” he said, “and I doubt we’ll see it improve in my lifetime.”
Although he may have wanted to, Zhou couldn’t skip the event. The lure of the prize money was far too great. This was especially the case in 2009, which was shaping up to be a lean year for professional golfers in China. The pro-am was the first domestic tournament since mid-June, ending a perplexing hiatus during what was supposed to be the heart of the playing season. The China Tour had mysteriously fizzled out. Only four of the planned eight to twelve tournaments had been scheduled, and the tour’s organizers had offered little explanation to Zhou or the others as to what was going on. At the Beijing pro-am, some players were still clinging to the hope of a fifth event in Guangzhou, and maybe another in Shanghai. But no one could say exactly when these would take place. It could be next week. It could be never.
The lack of tournaments was getting to Zhou. Emboldened by his performance in 2008 – those two top-ten finishes especially – he was determined he would earn his pro player card in 2009. He had to place third or better in a sanctioned China Golf Association event, or finish in the top twelve of 2009’s order of merit, which wouldn’t be easy.
Zhou also desperately needed a sponsor. He had a family to support, and this might be his final year on tour if he couldn’t find some help to cover the expenses. There was a businessman in Chongqing who owned a golf cart factory and had already offered Zhou a job as a salesman. If Zhou’s playing career didn’t pick up, he’d have to consider taking it. That prospect didn’t excite him.
So in February, Zhou took a risk. He arranged an unpaid break from his job at Haoyun Driving Range, said goodbye to Liu Yan and little Hanhan and left Chongqing for Shanghai’s David Leadbetter Golf Academy, more than a thousand miles away. There, he would train with Michael Dickie, the Scottish coach who had been so privately critical of Zhou’s attitude in 2008. Dickie had agreed to take Zhou on free of charge. This bit of good fortune had to mean this would be Zhou’s big year.
For a solid month, all Zhou did was train. Dickie analyzed every aspect of his game and, as he had suspected, discovered Zhou had all of the physical aspects down. Sure, a little fine-tuning here and there wouldn’t hurt, but Zhou’s biggest obstacle really was the mental game. Zhou said Dickie had taught him to calm down: “My mind is more peaceful than before.” He also got in better shape. He lost nine pounds while he was in Shanghai, and his trousers were all now a bit loose. He was becoming more fit, in every way. “I’ve never felt like a professional golfer before,” Zhou reflected. He’d always been too distracted by his day job, too preoccupied with paying the bills. “But this month, I finally feel like a pro. All you do is think about how to golf well.”
But, despite Dickie’s generosity, this feeling didn’t come for free. Zhou had to make major sacrifices to live like a pro during his month in Shanghai. He had no income, and worried about his job security at the driving range. His bosses there didn’t hide their displeasure with his plan. He had to pay for his flight to Shanghai and a room at a two-bit boarding house on the outskirts of the city, and he was convinced the landlord was going through his things while he was gone.
On one of his days off from practicing, Zhou visited a fitness center in the city. The gym was small, but relatively high-end for China, and part of a luxury apartment complex popular with foreigners in Shanghai’s French Concession. A long row of cardio machines sat behind a tall wall of windows looking out onto Huaihai Road.
Zhou was probably the strongest person there, but he appeared tentative, unsure. He watched the other people in the gym closely. Several times he hopped on a machine immediately after someone else had finished a set. His movements were hasty and often awkward, but believable enough that his approach could be chalked up to cultural differences in technique – somewhat like his homegrown style of golf. But when Zhou decided to give the treadmill a try, the jig was up: it was clear he had no idea what he was doing.
He straddled the moving belt as if it was a mighty river surging beneath him, and he clutched the grips so tightly his hands turned white. He built up the courage to dive in, but did so in spurts. He’d run a few steps, then straddle, run a few steps, then straddle, as though the belt was burning his feet. “I kept thinking the machine was going to push me backwards and make me fall off it,” Zhou later said.
His confusion seemed odd – at least one of the Chinese golf magazines had run photos of him using an elliptical machine as part of a profile. “That was just posed,” Zhou explained. “The magazine made me do it. The machine wasn’t even turned on.”
It turned out that, although he’d seen gyms on television and in movies, he’d never been to one before.
He wasn’t a stranger to physical training, however. As a teenager, he said, he would lift weights occasionally – large rocks, really, carved into the shape of a square, with a hole cut into one side to fashion a handle. They were called Chinese stone locks, and they’d been around for thousands of years, a sort of an ancient kettle bell. Zhou had seen the stone locks used as strengthening tools in the kung fu dramas he watched as a child, and he had wanted to be big and strong like the stars of those shows. “I did it when my village friends were with me,” he said. “We’d always compete to see who could lift the most.” Zhou could lift sixty-five pounds (thirty kilograms) five or six times in a row back then. “Today, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.
Still, Zhou was feeling good about his game. He had finished second at a local event at Shanghai Links Golf & Country Club, and he liked his chances at the two-day Shanghai qualifying tournament that would take place in mid-March before the Volvo China Open in April. Simply joining the field for such a prestigious event, the longest running international tournament in China, would be a major achievement. He needed a top-three finish in Shanghai to earn a spot in the China Open.
Zhou felt confident going into the final round of qualifying not because of his weeks of training with a coach, or his newfound levels of fitness, but because of a dream. The night before, Zhou had dreamed that swift waters had overtaken his hometown. He was certain this was a good sign. According to Chinese superstition, a flood of water in a dream means a flood of wealth in real life.
At the tournament, Zhou bogeyed two of the final three holes and finished in fourth place, just one stroke out of third. The Volvo China Open would have to wait for another year. “The flood didn’t swallow me in the dream,” Zhou said later. “Maybe if it did I would have had better luck.”
He didn’t have time to dwell on what could have been. He was on a flight headed for Xiamen just four hours after finishing his round. The following morning he was scheduled to tee off at 7:30 a.m. in the opening round of the Dell Championship at Orient Golf Country Club, the official season opener of the 2009 Omega China Tour. And there was a full schedule of events to come.
*
Perhaps Zhou needed a flood to wash away all of Guizhou province, because as the China Tour began, things were not going according to plan. At Xiamen, Zhou placed fifty-eighth, his worst result since 2006. A month later in Nanjing, he opened with an 80 and had to hustle to finish in the top forty. Finally, in June, things started to improve for him. He finished under par and cracked the top twenty at the tournament in Chengdu. And the following weekend, in Anji, he closed with rounds of 69 and 70 to finish tied for twenty-fifth at 3-under.
He was starting to play more consistently. But then the tournaments stopped. And Zhou lost his job back in Chongqing.
Over the past year, Chongqing had been caught up in a political crackdown. The crackdown had nothing to do with illegal golf courses – it was a government attempt to wipe out organized crime. The campaign, called dahei, or “striking black”, was the brainchild of Bo Xilai, son of one of the Communist Party’s “eight elders,” Bo Yibo, and most recently the country’s minister of commerce. At the Party conference in 2007, Bo Xilai had been assigned to serve as chief of Chongqing as part of a reshuffling of the Party’s politburo.
Bo seemed intent to use the position to prove himself to the Party leadership. Thousands of people were arrested, including gangsters, businessmen and the former deputy head of Chongqing’s Public Security Bureau. “Many former Chongqing leaders had no way to deal with the gangsters,” Zhou said. “But Bo Xilai is the son of a powerful ex-official. He can do this. No one can get him into trouble.”
Zhou said several of the “bosses” at his driving range were involved, in one way or another, in the types of “black” society activities Bo Xilai had targeted. One was arrested. Others ran away. This exodus at the top, according to Zhou, left all the decision-making power at the driving range to one man – Zhang Yong. “And he’s very mean,” Zhou said.
When Zhou’s contract came up for renewal in July, Zhang refused. There was no “thank you for your four years of service,” no farewell party, not even a free box of golf balls. Zhou learned through backchannels that he’d been replaced by a foreign coach, a Canadian who’d been working in Shanghai, in an experiment Zhang hoped would drum up more business. “He doesn’t even speak Mandarin,” Zhou said of the new coach. “He coaches through a translator. But the translator doesn’t know golf terminology. How can that be better than being coached by me?”
Zhou was stupefied. He was insulted. And he was short three months’ pay Zhang still owed him. But once the initial sting wore off, Zhou realized what he really was: lost. He’d never really stopped to consider just how integral golf had become to his life – for the past fifteen years or so, it had always been there. Now he lacked both a place to coach and, with the China Tour faltering, an outlet to compete. He thought about his wife, his son, his house. He was jobless and clueless, a dangerous combination.
“What skills do I really have?” Zhou said. “It’s not like I can just hit the street and line up to find a job, right? I’m a golfer.”
Zhou made some calls inquiring about coaching positions, but he’d never been a very good salesman, especially when selling himself. He had some leads in Guangdong, but he was reluctant to move back there. Guangdong was part of his past, and Zhou was all about moving forward.
Some suggested he move to Beijing. But Zhou said people in the capital were too aloof for his tastes. And he wouldn’t be able to put up with the city’s traffic and air pollution. Shanghai? Too expensive. Zhou was worried he wouldn’t be able to afford a good quality of life for his family there. Indeed, Zhou had reasons against moving to a variety of Chinese cities.
“It’s not that easy,” he said. “I am not single now. I have Hanhan and Liu Yan.” He paused to take a sip of beer. “But I would go to Hainan,” he added. “People there are very down-to-earth and leisurely.”
He knew he couldn’t afford to be picky much longer. He realized it every time he took a look at his dwindling bank account, which he jokingly compared to the Chinese stock market, “becoming less and less.” He still had some savings. He could still cover his daily bills. But something had to change.
“I lost my job on July 21,” said Zhou, still picking at his fish in the suburban Beijing restaurant. “Now it is early September. I have spent ten thousand yuan this month. I don’t know how I have spent that much.”
Zhou was paying more than 1,000 yuan a month for an ayi, or nanny, to help look after Hanhan. Earlier in the summer he had spent 10,000 yuan trying to help Liu Yan open an ill-fated clothing store. And then there were the more extravagant purchases that only a year or two earlier would have been unthinkable for Zhou. Purchases that, if word of them ever traveled back to Qixin, would give his parents a heart attack. After a job interview in Guangzhou, Zhou crossed the border into Hong Kong and bought a 3,000-yuan necklace for Liu Yan. During a tournament in South Korea, he brought her back 3,000 yuan worth of Lancôme cosmetics. At this dinner in Beijing, he was decked out in a brand-new outfit. Shoes by Adidas: 550 yuan. T-shirt by Nautica: 330 yuan. Jeans by Lee: 700 yuan. “I just want them to see what a good life I am living even without a job,” he said.
But it wasn’t a good life. Not at all. Later Zhou would admit to being in a state of depression. When he was in Chongqing he slept often, and spent many of his waking hours lying on the sofa, doing nothing. “I didn’t know what to do at home,” Zhou said. “I couldn’t calm down to do anything.” He stopped hearing from his students. He stopped reaching out to his friends.
Zhou did buy a membership at a gym a short bus ride from home, and he worked out for a few hours each afternoon, learning how to master the equipment there. He said he used this exercise to “balance his life.” After the gym it was time for dinner, followed by an hour or two with Hanhan – rare moments of happiness for Zhou – some TV and then bed. It was the same routine every day.
Yet, for the first time in more than a decade, that routine did not include golf. Pride would not allow Zhou to return to Haoyun, his old driving range. And he had little motivation to find another place to practice. The tournament schedule was nearly empty, save for the annoying pro-am that had brought him to Beijing, and a couple other events he had no chance of winning.
“If I had the money, I would emigrate to Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau,” he said, pouring another glass of Yanjing beer. “That way I could attend more tournaments. Many Chinese winners in international sporting events say they feel proud of China, but I don’t think so.”
The restaurant was empty now. Even the kitchen workers had wrapped up their card game and left.
“I’m very happy to be drinking beer,” Zhou said. “I have finished three bottles now. Last night, I drank two bottles of beer, and today I shot 2-under.” He ordered another bottle, betting four beers would mean 4-under in round two.
“If I can finish second here, and make a cut in the two tournaments in South Korea, I have great opportunity to be in the top twelve at the end of the year. Finally get my pro card.” He sipped his beer. “I know that is impossible, but I still can daydream like that.”
He finished his fourth beer and a taxi was called. Outside, everything but the flicker of restaurant neon and the glow of two taxi headlights was black. It was not yet 10 p.m., but that was late for this neighborhood on the outskirts of Beijing, which, aside from the golf courses, comprised farms, small factories and a few villages.
Zhou sighed as he got into the taxi. “After drinking some beer, I will sleep well, I hope,” he announced to no one in particular.
“I think you are right,” the driver said, and drove off.
Zhou shot 1-over, not 4-under, in the second round at Beijing, but by the end of four rounds he had managed to finish in seventeenth place and earn a 24,000-yuan pre-tax payday, his best haul of the season. But his daydream was not to be realized. Later that month, he missed the cut at both tournaments in South Korea. In October, he finished sixty-first at the Midea China Classic in Guangzhou, earning a measly 1,040 yuan. And the Omega China Tour never started up again. The abbreviated four-tournament schedule marked the end of the tour’s five-year run.
China Tour organizers said the tour folded because Omega, the title sponsor, had backed out. Omega said they hadn’t backed out and were just as confused about what was going on as the players. One person close to the situation simply blamed the “global economic situation.”
“It was a low valley in my life,” Zhou later said. “No tournaments, no job. I felt like a failure without any future.”
*
Zhou may have been struggling to find a job, but Martin Moore was overwhelmed with them. According to the National Golf Federation, fewer than fifty new golf courses opened in the United States in 2009, down from a peak of nearly four hundred openings in 2000 and the lowest total the NGF had on record since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, in China, it was estimated that as many as 250 courses were under construction, with some 600 more in various stages of planning. It was unclear exactly what percentage of new courses China accounted for globally, but one leading course designer said the figure was sure to be “staggering.”
So too were the sizes of the projects being discussed, one after the other featuring numbers that would have been unheard of before the likes of Mission Hills. “This year alone I have probably heard of ten projects that are ten-course deals,” one golf design professional said. “All over China, from Beijing to Kunming to Qingdao to Hainan to Chengdu. Ten-course deals are like the magic number now.”
China was propping up the entire industry. Like it or not, if you weren’t working in Hainan or somewhere else in China, you probably weren’t working at all. And, in 2009, no one was working more than Martin.
Martin had bought out his Flagstick business partners, golf course architects Brian Curley and Lee Schmidt, who by then, with their special focus on Asia, were among the busiest designers in the world. Flagstick had begun as the construction arm of Schmidt-Curley Design, and was intended to focus primarily on building Schmidt-Curley courses. But Martin wanted to get more projects on his plate. More and more designers were looking to China, and Martin wanted Flagstick to build their courses, too. Schmidt and Curley weren’t crazy about the idea. They saw it as helping the competition and suggested it would be best if Schmidt-Curley and Flagstick parted ways. “I paid a pretty penny to them,” Martin said.
Over the years, he’d realized some people just didn’t have the right temperament for China. There was a project manager, someone he would hire in a second in the United States, that Martin felt sure “wouldn’t stand a prayer” in China. He wouldn’t have the patience for Chinese politics. He wouldn’t be able to self-censor. “He’d get in a meeting with the Chinese and tell them all to go fuck themselves,” Martin mused. “He’d say, ‘You guys are stupid. That’s not what I said.’ You know, that kind of guy. He’d do that in a meeting in America and get respect from people. But, he’d get killed over it in China.”
Martin had put in the hard spadework, and it was time to reap the rewards. After the buyout, he went on what he called a “splurge.” “Fuck everybody,” he said. “I’m going to sign every job I can get.” He spent the majority of his time chasing down new projects, sending out letters to every golf course architect he knew. This hustling paid off. He went from three jobs in China to fifteen.
China, of course, was the only place in the world where numbers like that were even possible. Everyone in the industry was knocking on China’s door, and Martin was getting a lot of calls. “Do you need help?” underworked colleagues would inevitably ask. Big firms started coming to him for advice, too. They knew they wanted to be in China, but they had no idea where to start. Would he be willing to give them some pointers? Martin was reluctant to give up his “secrets,” but he did tell them what he had long been telling everyone else all these years:
It ain’t like America.
Getting your money is harder than hell.
They don’t know what they’re doing.
They don’t listen to you.
It’s frustrating.
Some of the conversations Martin had with potential competitors actually reassured him. China was going to eat these executives alive. For example, one person heading to the Beijing Golf Show for the first time had sought out Martin, who prepared himself for the usual “Business in China 101” line of questioning. Instead, he got something like this:
So we land at the Beijing airport?
Are there buses that can take us to the hotels?
How do we get around?
How about hotels?
Are there any you can recommend?
How about eating over there?
I’ve heard you’ve got to be really careful over there because what you eat can make you sick.
Is that true?
“It’s like, come on,” Martin said. “We’re talking about flying into Beijing, not Changbaishan or Changsha or someplace like that. We’re talking about the biggest city there is, where there’s three hundred taxis waiting outside the airport, where there are more five-star hotels than any city you’ve been, where there are some of the best restaurants in the world. I mean, he better not ever leave Beijing, you know?”
The person who worried about taxis, hotels and food was not the only China rookie at the Beijing Golf Show that year. The number of American golf architects pitching their wares alone had increased fivefold from the previous year. The competition for new jobs was going to be fierce. But Martin felt confident about his track record of building golf courses – and not just any golf courses, but high quality ones – in the challenging environment. “The owners want to know what you’ve done in China,” said Martin. “The owners know how their business works here. And they know the ‘green’ guy doesn’t stand a chance.”
At an introductory meeting with a developer, Martin would invariably whip out his map. It was large and printed in color, designed to make a splash. He would fold it out and show the developer all of Flagstick’s projects in China, each marked with a flagstick, of course. “That impresses clients,” Martin said.
Price was important in these early discussions, but perhaps not in the way most people would expect. Martin often heard that Flagstick was too expensive, and even some of his staff suggested they should start offering a cut-rate package to better compete with local Chinese construction companies. “I’m not doing it,” Martin would reply to such proposals. “You know, that’s not who I’m competing against. They want to hire them for half the price, let them hire them. That’s not the same service we provide.”
Just as often, he was being told his prices were too low – especially when he was talking to some of the high-end builders. Golf was still new to many Chinese developers, and they often had no idea how much it should cost to build a golf course. Really, they had no idea what services a golf construction management firm offered. They just knew they needed help. So if one firm came in with a bid of forty thousand dollars a month, and another came in at twenty thousand dollars, the Chinese owner might actually lean toward the more expensive option. “A lot of the Chinese mentality is that they want the best, and they’ve got the money,” Martin said. “They think if they pay them more, they are going to get a lot better service. That might not necessarily be true, but a lot of them think that way. I know we’ve worked a bunch of jobs where we were the most expensive bidders.”
Sometimes, the lack of experience building golf courses inspired Chinese developers to make strange requests. Martin recalled one owner who wanted to build a water-themed golf course. No golf carts. No cart paths. Golfers would travel from hole to hole by boat. Another owner wanted to build a villa right in the middle of a par-3 fairway. And then there was the guy who wanted a hole to be a giant funnel – anyone whose ball landed within thirty feet of the pin on this par-3 hole was guaranteed a hole-in-one. “Mini-golf on a professional golf course,” Martin sighed.
To show potential clients the company was established and serious about both golf and China, Martin opened an office in Kunming. He also set up a legal Chinese company, Kunming Flagstick Consulting and Management (unsurprisingly, they were advised not to have “golf” in the name), enabling him to offer contracts in yuan, which gave customers added convenience and allowed him to work with businesses that didn’t have large amounts of US dollars at their disposal. He said that being able to sign contracts in yuan “was huge.”
An office and a map weren’t enough to land a job in China, however. He had to invest a large amount of time and money in pursuing prospects. There was usually a long, drawn-out courting process. Every golf course, he came to realize, was a potential girlfriend who liked to be spoiled, and enjoyed playing hard to get. It wasn’t abnormal for Martin to meet with a potential client six or seven times before everyone signed on the dotted line; one client played hard to get for more than a year. At least half of the time they would meet over big dinners that merged into baijiu-fueled drinkfests, Martin picking up the tab. He would make sure to come bearing presents, too. Maybe a nice golf club, or a Flagstick shirt, or a hat signed by Jack Nicklaus. If he was getting really deep in the process, he might break out something a bit bigger, like a set of Jack Nicklaus golf clubs.
He had learned that the key to these pre-deal dialogues was simple: he had to be sure he was meeting with the right person. “You can waste a lot of time and effort… if you’re talking to the No. 3 or No. 4 man, and you don’t know he’s the No. 3 or No. 4 man,” Martin said. “He’ll let you believe he makes the decisions, but all he wants is a piece of the action, and a free meal or two.”
Once the job was contracted, Martin would inform his project managers to stay adaptable. Every job, every owner, was different. There was no how-to for building a golf course in China – and even if there was, it’d have to be written in pencil. “You need to be able to meet that owner, that client, the first time, and you really have to figure out their personality, their way of business,” he said. “What they like and what they don’t like and all that. And then adapt your management skills to it.”
*
In 1984, when China welcomed its first modern-day golf course, the venerable travel book publisher Fodor’s came out with a guidebook to the People’s Republic. “You need have no fear about money dealings with the Chinese,” the book told its readers confidently. “They are always scrupulously honest, and will follow you out of the shop to return a couple of coins if you happen to leave them on a counter.”
Martin’s experience during China’s golf course boom hadn’t been quite so quaint. In fact, he guessed some 95 percent of his industry colleagues would have little nice to say about their money dealings with the Chinese. “From a business standpoint, people say they’re liars and they’re crooked and all that stuff,” Martin said. “But, you know what, that’s fine. We’re successful here and the others aren’t. They don’t have the patience for it, and they don’t know how to deal with the Chinese way of doing business.”
And patience was essential.
Martin said many Western businessmen who arrived in China full of enthusiasm were “blown away” by how things operate. Some would take it personally, get pissed off, and leave. “I think that’s one of the keys to our success,” he said. “We know there are side deals. We know that the owner’s rep, who might be our direct contact, has all kinds of deals and we know that’s going on. I always tell my guys that we have to do the best we can to make it right.”
For example, if Martin’s team discovered that a developer’s No. 2 or No. 3 man was getting a side deal from a certain gravel supplier, who happened to be providing the wrong kind of gravel, Martin instructed his project managers to tread very carefully. “If we become an obstacle for that guy,” he said, “he’s going to get us kicked out of there. He will do it and he will succeed at it. And we won’t stand a chance in hell.”
Most important, he said, was to stay out of price negotiations over construction materials, because that’s where the lucrative side deals occur, and it was a quick way to make an enemy. “Fight for quality all the way,” he would tell his guys, don’t get tangled up over a yuan here and there. “I just want the quality to be good,” he said. But it wasn’t enough to fight; you also had to document that fight with memo after memo to the developer. The paper trail was important. “At the end of the day, we can’t force the developer’s guy to do something. If he does something we know is wrong then our ass will be covered ten times over. If one of the big, big investors comes down and says, ‘Why did you let them do that?’ – it’s going to be documented.”
Then there were the “experts” that often came attached to jobs. These people may or may not have tangible experience building golf courses, but for one reason or another they had the ear of the owner (who usually had no experience building golf courses). Often they were the owner’s friends or confidants, and they were paid to monitor the construction process. The only way they had of proving their worth was to point out mistakes, real or imagined, or take credit for things they didn’t do. “Problem here is we get people who don’t know anything about golf, and they get so involved that they just screw up everything,” one of Martin’s project managers said. “So you’ve got to keep fighting them and telling them that’s not the way you do it. And it’s tiring.”
Martin said such meddling was representative of a general lack of trust common in business relationships throughout the country, especially when one of the parties in the relationship is foreign. “It’s a China thing,” he said. “They screw everybody, so they think everybody screws them.” This constant air of skepticism created reams of paperwork for Martin’s crews. Everything had to be logged and documented. It was a never-ending effort to defend their work and prove their own worth.
Martin often wished he could ask for the same proof of worth from some of the subcontractors he was forced to work with. On one project Martin worked on in Yunnan, he said the cart path contractors were “horrible” and built “the worst cart paths you’ve seen in your life.” Everyone, from Martin’s project managers to representatives of the Chinese developer, was out there telling the contractor that his work was unacceptable, that they needed to rip everything out and start over. “Well, they were the local government mafia,” Martin said. “And they weren’t going to rip out anything. And there’s nothing we can do. They’re basically going to let them put in a shitty cart path for fifty-four holes, pay them all their money and get them off the job, and then go hire someone else to come rip it out and start all over.” But what about those times when a contractor did a good job? “I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to say that the contractor is doing a great job, even if he is,” one of Martin’s project managers reported. “Because if I say that, then the owner thinks I’m getting paid under the table!”
Contractors’ profit margins were also unusually high in China. In the United States, contractors who won a job were likely to get, at best, a 7 to 10 percent profit. In China, that figure could rise as high as 40 to 50 percent. There were simple reasons for this. First of all, contractors were often obliged to pay commissions to the people who helped them secure the job in the first place. Then they had to issue more payments to the people who helped them perform their work with minimal interference from government regulatory bodies. It was said some people added a line item to all of their budgets: “NEGOTIATE WITH GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES.” That covered all sorts of contingencies (and sounded slightly better than “bribes”).
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.