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 area’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:
• Accelerate intensive development of the leisure industry
• Increase the wage income of farmers
• Advance the construction of a peaceful and harmonious society
The words were printed on an image the size of a movie theater screen – a color photo of King Valley golf course taken when the fairways had been decidedly greener.
Access to the club was closed in early 2010, soon after the “crackdown” press conference, but if you crossed the creek you could find a dirt path winding around the course’s southern end, offering several fence-obstructed views of what was once known as the back nine. Nearly a yard of earth was removed in some spots, and most of the fairways looked like freshly plowed fields awaiting the spring planting season. But a closer inspection revealed what could, at best, be called “peculiarities.” All the greens and tee boxes in view – the most expensive architectural features on a golf course – were untouched. Many of the cuts around them seemed to follow a neat line. Greens, and what remained of some of the fairways, were being watered and mowed daily. The paved cart paths were still in place. So were all the buildings and most of the landscaping. Some smaller shrubs remained wrapped in white plastic to protect them from the winter cold. Was this the new workers’ paradise? A putting green for every production team?
“Don’t worry – the course is not going to become farmland,” one of the several dozen workers who remained at King Valley said reassuringly. “We are working on repairing the underground pipes that were broken. It’s just a matter of time before we open again. Since the greens were not harmed, of course it will take a very short time to rebuild it. The government has certain guanxi with our company.”
That favorable relationship would seem to be strained these days. When Beijing’s focus turned to King Valley, the local officials made a figurative mad dash for the hills. Many of them denied knowing a golf course existed inside the “Anji China Ecotourism and Fitness Center,” as King Valley was then officially known. This was, of course, ridiculous: King Valley had been a stop on China’s domestic golf tour the year before; it had been the official training center of the Zhejiang provincial golf team; and the large sign the local government installed beside the highway directing people to “King Valley Country Club” included the stylized silhouette of a man swinging a golf club. “Only a ghost would believe their claims,” said a shopkeeper in Jianshan. “Government officials go there all the time. How can they not know?”
Despite the workers’ assertions at the golf course, sources familiar with the situation said Hangzhou-based Handnice Group – the company behind the project – was in no hurry to pay for the necessary repairs, or to jump back in bed with the local government officials who they felt had betrayed them. Many in Jianshan believed the course’s destruction had been a calculated move by the local officials, a grand display intended to shield them from punishment from Beijing. It’s noteworthy that the bulldozers were brought in with little public fanfare. The only newspaper report about the drama at King Valley, which appeared in Hangzhou’s Youth Times, was later expunged from the paper’s website. “The local government already turned their back on [Handnice] once, so it’s very hard to say they will not do it again,” said the source. “The developers will not move forward unless they can be assured the project is now fully legal.”
Handnice, to be sure, deserved its share of the blame in this mess. The risks associated with opening a golf course in China, while seemingly benign in recent years, were no secret. And while official land designations in rural China often changed on the latest whims of those in power, no one could miss the fact that villagers were farming – rice and pears, mostly – on a portion of the land that would become King Valley Country Club. In fact, the company had paid close to $1.2 million in fines for illegal land use between 2006 and 2008, so they were well aware of the turbulent political climate. But after each fine, sources said, the local government urged them to carry on with construction. The fines were viewed merely as a cost of doing business.
In this case, it seemed the process of relocating and compensating villagers got too messy, placing King Valley on the central government’s shortlist for investigation. Because the state owned all the land, money from the developer had gone directly to the local government, as per usual. Much of the money had got caught in the government filter, and never made it to the villagers who called the land home.
One elderly man in Jianshan said the 100,000-yuan settlement he received was not enough to cover the cost of his new home, and that the 1,000 yuan he was set to receive in “rent” each year from the golf course, which charges up to 800 yuan for a round of golf, was “definitely not enough.” He shrugged his shoulders and added, “But what can you do?”
It was unclear what would come next for King Valley’s owners. When asked for a status update, a worker at the Anji Land and Resources Bureau said only “that’s already been dealt with” before hanging up the phone.
*
Such stories rang true for Martin Moore, who estimated that 90 percent of his projects encounter land-related “obstacles” of some kind, be they villager relocations, the removal of graves, or disputes over what was or wasn’t farmland. The farmland issue, which according to Martin had been cropping up more and more in recent years, was a thorny one, because, as one course designer put it, “it seems like every square inch of China that is not already under a building or a highway is being used to farm something.” Such complications should be settled between the local government, the developer and the area’s residents long before a construction crew hits a site. But in Martin’s experience they rarely were.
Even when things were ironed out, and all the local agencies declared themselves satisfied, the golf course was still technically illegal, after all. You could get permits for construction and permits to move land and permits to plant grass, but you couldn’t get a permit to build a golf course. So when government inspectors (the “golf police,” Martin and others called them) came knocking, as the owners of King Valley learned, you’re only as good as your relationship with the local brass. And if Beijing decided to get involved, that probably wasn’t getting you very far.
“These guys get approval from local government, and it’s all about how many nights in the karaoke and this and that,” Martin said. “They’re going to eventually convince the local government to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ but when the central government comes down on them, those guys aren’t going to say, ‘I told them they could do it.’ It’s pretty ugly, and that’s the history with the village issues. These owners don’t go in there and clear all the villagers. They go in there and negotiate with the local government. ‘Okay, we have this many villagers. Here’s the compensation.’ And how much of that goes from the government to the villagers? It’s never enough, and the owners are always digging back into their pockets because you still have villagers who aren’t going to move. That’s business in China, I guess.”
Martin always steered clear of this side of the business. But he found developers rarely did all the necessary legwork before launching into their projects. “I ask the same questions to every one of them when we first meet,” Martin said. “Do you own all the land? Do you have any villager problems? Do you have this? Do you have that? Please do your due diligence, do your homework and find that out. We need to know that now rather than later because we mobilize a big crew and if we hit all these walls it just costs them millions of dollars. Obviously some of them have better connections with government than others so even those that do have obstacles can get clear pretty quick.”
That developers could move forward with so many question marks hanging over their projects was proof, Martin acknowledged, that some kind of crackdown was probably justified. But he thought it wouldn’t make much difference. “They are never going to be able to stop all the golf,” he said. Martin reported that most of the “respected” people in the industry agreed with him that the government needed to get “a better handle on things.” The real problems were people “who wake up with a dream” to build a golf course and take off on a development project “destroying the world, without anybody knowing about it.”
*
Initially, when Martin read all the “crackdown” headlines – his colleagues had forwarded them around like wildfire – he figured it was just the “government flexing its muscles before Chinese New Year.” Martin had been in China long enough to know not to overreact to every story about the government targeting golf course development. The busiest years of his career hadn’t come until after China had made his profession illegal! He’d seen probably a dozen stories about a supposed crackdown in the past six months. “The first couple used to scare me a bit, but now for every crackdown announcement, I get twenty-five leads right behind it,” he said.
“Maybe I’m just trying to be optimistic, but I see no way in the world China’s going to be able to put it to a halt. I’ve been telling people, if they shut down 50 percent, even 70 percent, of projects, there are still too many of them – a hell of a lot of golf courses are still going to be built. I counted my prospect list this morning because I had a meeting, and I had eighty-seven golf courses on my prospect list and thirty-seven of those are what I call ‘hot’ and ‘new’ leads.”
In the past few weeks, Martin had heard that several golf projects around Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which had become a hotbed of construction activity, had been put on hold, pending further review. The golf police had been frisking golf courses, both finished and unfinished. An official provincial notice called for local governments in Sichuan to “stop approving and building new golf courses.” It cited the 2004 moratorium issued by the State Council and insisted the authorities “immediately clean up and correct” existing golf courses and other “forbidden projects.” The province’s “limited land resources” were instead supposed to be used to “build important infrastructure.” Golf courses currently under construction, the notice said, must be halted, and those in the planning stages were “forbidden to start.”
Martin was about to sign a contract for a new twenty-seven-hole layout south of Chengdu called Seasons International Country Club, and he feared it might get caught up in the crackdown. He was soon told the contract would have to wait until after Chinese New Year. Then, just a few days later, he got word that the people behind the project wanted to hurry up and sign the deal before the holiday, with an eye toward “moving dirt by March 1.” “That’s right in Chengdu, so they must’ve resolved what problems they had,” Martin said. It seemed proof to him that the latest crackdown wasn’t “for real.”
But after the Chinese New Year, he kept hearing stories about projects in Sichuan. Some were saying all course projects in the province were to be shut down for six months. Worse, he’d been told that a nearly completed course on the outskirts of Chengdu had been forced to reforest its fairways. People talked about the hundreds of new trees sticking out of acres of freshly landscaped lawns, but no one could pinpoint the course where this had supposedly taken place.
There were other examples of government interference that Martin couldn’t shake off as hearsay, however, because they were happening on his own sites. The owner of Seasons International had officially extended the construction schedule into the following year, and the scope of the undertaking was starting to resemble the “sports park” it was known as in the official documents – more so than the golf course he’d been contracted to build. They were going to clear trees and move dirt, build lakes and shape the layout. They were going to do everything to it except make it look like a golf course. No greens, no bunkers no tee boxes; just a very expensive park with no public access. “It’s basically landscape architecture right now,” Martin said. He suspected that the owner had a long-term plan in mind. “It’s going to look just like that, and then, when they think it’s going to ease up, they’ll bring somebody in to cut out the greens and bunkers.”
Things were less “funny” at one of Martin’s other projects, northeast of Chengdu, where workers had become accustomed to helicopters “and all kinds of shit” flying overhead on a daily basis – the Beijing golf police’s not-so-subtle way of letting them know they were being watched. It got to be like working in a war zone. “The owner’s comment to my guy was, ‘Screw ’em. We’ll shoot ’em down,’” Martin said. “There we are, grassing holes and cutting in bunkers and putting in sand. Either the owner is just not listening or they know the right people. Who knows how it works?” And that was coming from someone who had worked in China longer than almost anyone.
Martin had just returned from San Diego, where the annual Golf Industry Show, or at least what he called the “Campbell’s condensed soup” version of it, had been held. The industry, like the economy, was hurting, and attendance was down. In the United States, far more golf courses were closing each year than opening. “It’s China, China, China,” Martin said of the mood at the trade show. “That’s all anybody was talking about: China, China, China.” Meanwhile, the annual China Golf Show in Beijing was growing every year. Martin recalled when few paid the show any attention. Now, everyone was “whoring for the business.”
China may have been a perplexing, and at times infuriating, place to build a golf course, but it also was pretty much the only place building golf courses. One representative of an American golf course design firm compared the goings on in China to the Oklahoma Land Run combined with the California Gold Rush. With so many firms going all-in on China, a helicopter here and a bulldozer there were causes for concern. Just what were the golf police going to do next?
“I’d lose sleep trying to think about what is going to happen, because I surely can’t control it,” Martin said.
*
In the midst of all this confusion, China’s State Council issued a notice with far less fanfare. It seemed to acknowledge that some forms of golf development were now permitted, but only in one location: Hainan. The document, made public on December 31, 2009, entitled “Several Opinions of the State Council on Promoting the Construction and Development of the Hainan International Tourism Island” discussed openly the government’s goal “to scientifically plan, limit the total quantity of, rationally distribute and regulate the development of golf tourism under the preconditions that land use planning and urban planning regulations are adhered to, arable land (especially basic farmland) is not occupied, forests and the ecological environment are effectively protected, the legal rights of farmers are safeguarded, and land-use legal procedures are strictly abided by.” Section three of the notice was called “Exploiting Hainan’s unique advantages, and raising overall service standards in the tourism sector.” In it, the State Council outlined an official desire to “encourage the hosting of large-scale cultural performances and festive events, to enrich the performance event market, and to support the hosting of international regattas, international cycling events and professional golf tours in Hainan.”
The notice was publicly backed up by a press conference less than a week later. It was a familiar, almost annual, routine: Hainan’s government leaders announced their latest plans to turn the island into the next Hawaii or Bali. This time, several stories followed, mostly in the state media. They talked about Hainan’s plans to “clean up” tourism and become a “tourist heaven.” They mentioned Hainan’s plans to promote “red” tourism while at the same time dabbling in games of chance, including, someday perhaps, horse racing. There was also talk of adding facilities for water sports, scuba diving and cruise ships, and offering visa-free travel and tax-free shopping.
Buried in the print coverage was just one line about golf course development: “Asked about expanding golf courses in Hainan, Luo [Baoming] denied the province had violated China’s strict rules on building golf courses and had never used subsistence farmland to build golf courses.”
The denial had taken place at the press conference, during an exchange between Hainan’s governor, Luo Baoming, Hainan’s Party chief, Wei Liucheng, and a reporter from Associated Press Television News, David Wivell. Wivell had asked Wei and Luo directly about Project 791:
David Wivell: The central government has in recent years been urging developers not to build more golf courses, but reports say Hainan is completing a twenty-two-course project – I think it is called the 791 Project. Why is Hainan building so many? And how will that impact the environment?
Wei Liucheng: As to golf, you mentioned building twenty-two new golf courses – I’m not really clear about it. The documents from the State Council do have one regulation about Hainan developing golf. That’s Article 3, Item 8, and it says, if it conforms to the general plan for the utilization of land, doesn’t occupy basic farmland, protects the ecological environment effectively and protects the interests of farmers under the premise of scientific planning, total control and rational distribution, the golf industry may be developed with regulation. Throughout the world, golf is an important factor to tourism, and regulated golf development is probably good for the development of tourism and the development of an economic society. But it needs to be standardized, and we cannot mess this up.
Luo Baoming: Let me add one point. Although the State Council said in the document that we can develop the golf industry, it has very restrictive conditions. I can say this: Hainan has never developed golf in a way that goes against the general plan for the utilization of land, and golf has never taken one acre of basic farmland. With this as a prerequisite, according to our plan’s demands, we will develop the golf industry moderately and orderly and within the parameters of State Council policies. The plan regarding this aspect still needs approval from the State Development and Reform Commission and related government departments.
One would assume that Wei, as the Party’s secretary, would be aware of a construction project the size of Hong Kong on his island. In October, ninety holes had been finished and grassed at Mission Hills, and two courses were playable. There had been talk of opening the courses to the public for limited play before Spring Festival in mid-February 2010. Some local government officials had already been spotted hitting balls on sections of the finished courses. In fact, there was one fairway in particular they used so often, workers dubbed it the “government hole.”
Perhaps Wei was simply abiding by the gag order on all things Project 791, all things Mission Hills, all things golf. The open secret was still officially top secret. But not for much longer. The grand reveal was coming.
*
Less than three months later, on March 15, 2010, the International Federation of PGA Tours and the International Golf Association announced, and then the Associated Press followed with news that golf’s World Cup was changing homes, and in 2011 would move from Mission Hills in Shenzhen to the new Mission Hills mega-complex on Hainan. It seemed a pretty standard press release, but it was significant for one reason: it represented the first admission in the media that Mission Hills Haikou was more than a myth.
It was unlike Mission Hills to do something so subtly. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories had been written about the Chus’ massive twelve-course golf club in Guangdong province (course Nos. 11 and 12 had opened in 2007 with a splash). Nearly every television broadcast in Asia of a major golfing event seemed to come “brought to you by Mission Hills.” Numerous advertisements would remind viewers of Mission Hills’ Guinness World Records-endorsed “World No. 1” status, even though Nanshan International Golf Club in northeastern China had Mission Hills beat by sixty-three holes. Ron Sirak, writing in Golf Digest magazine, called Mission Hills’ Shenzhen complex “golf’s version of Walt Disney World.”
Chasing after the superlatives, Mission Hills didn’t content itself with golf, either. It boasted of having Asia’s largest tennis center (fifty-one courts), Asia’s largest spa, the world’s largest putting course and the world’s biggest clubhouse (Mission Hills’ Dongguan Clubhouse checks in at a tidy 78,000 square yards). And Cindy Reid, chief instructor at Mission Hills, was being touted as the “World’s No. 1 Female Golf Instructor.”
Some who have worked with Mission Hills suggest the Chu family’s obsession with big numbers, with being No. 1, can often lead to unnecessary inflation of the statistics related to their projects. They want storylines they can sell to the media and the public, and to get them, sources said, they were willing to fudge the figures. Sometimes the publicized numbers were double the real ones, because Mission Hills wanted to be able to say, for example, that they had moved enough dirt to fill Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium thirty-six times, or installed enough electric cable to wrap around Hong Kong Island ten times. A PR staffer at some of Mission Hills’ bigger tournament events, including the 2008 World Cup, at which the club claimed 180,000 spectators, said attendance figures were routinely inflated by as much as ten times. “It was weird,” the worker said. “The actual figures were impressive enough. They were historic, in fact. No sense in making new numbers up.”
Ken Chu had another explanation for the string of superlatives in his company’s promotional materials. “We are perfectionists,” he said. “I think it runs in the family. You have to be devoted. You have to do it right.” Tenniel Chu, Ken’s younger brother and the executive director of Mission Hills, also held forth on the subject: “Mission Hills is a huge golfing PR machine. In the world of golf, whatever movement we do or event that we host, certainly we never hold back in terms of any of our golfing publicity.”
But, there it was, Mission Hills Haikou, the soon-to-be world’s largest golf club, making its public debut by playing a supporting role to a golf tournament decidedly lacking in visibility and significance. One had to wonder whether the press release was sent out too early – there wasn’t even a mention of Mission Hills Haikou on the Mission Hills website. But the release referred to “the newly opened Mission Hills Resort Hainan” as if the existence of the once top-secret project was common knowledge. It included a quote from the elusive David Chu, who said, “We are extremely pleased to be bringing the World Cup to our new development in Haikou on Hainan Island. Similar to its role in setting off the golf boom in China when it arrived at Mission Hills for the first time in 1995, the World Cup will undoubtedly play a significant role in establishing Hainan as the world’s foremost sports and leisure destination.” George O’Grady, chief executive of the European Tour added, “The impressive new Mission Hills complex at Hainan Island will offer a new experience for our players and for fans from around the world.”
A couple days later, however, a proper PR offensive took shape, and it was more befitting of Mission Hills’ typically grandiose style. After years of secrecy, the Hainan resort made its first appearance on the company website, where it promised travelers to the new destination they would find “limitless play” and “limitless prestige.” Then, on March 18, 2010, Mission Hills gathered media in Haikou for a press conference announcing not the club itself – that would have been too simple – but rather a star-studded tournament scheduled to make its debut at the new complex that October: the Mission Hills Star Trophy, billed as “Asia’s premier lifestyle event.” Reuters reported that the winner-takes-all purse of $1.28 million was “Asia’s richest individual prize.” On hand for the announcement were golf stars Greg Norman and Zhang Lianwei; Zhu Hansong, vice mayor of Haikou; Andy Pierce from Creative Artists Agency; Fan Xiaojun, vice chairman of the China Golf Association; and Tenniel Chu.
The very same day, in a separate conference hall at Mission Hills Haikou, Du Jiang, deputy head of China’s National Tourism Administration, told the crowd for a special session of the 2010 Bo’ao International Tourism Forum, that “China encourages well-planned environment-friendly development of golf tourism, especially in Hainan, the country’s only tropical island province.” Xinhua, China’s state-run news service, ran a story from the forum entitled “Hainan aims to be China’s golf capital” and called Mission Hills Haikou, which had three courses open for play, “the largest collection of golf courses in the world.”
This was another of those perfectly timed, expertly orchestrated Mission Hills “fortune teller” moments. China was in the midst of a tense crackdown on golf course development. The entire industry was on edge. And on the same day Mission Hills chooses to go public with its gargantuan Hainan project – at odds with Chinese law for much of its two-plus years of shrouded existence – it’s made clear that, thanks to recent changes in local law, the project was not only legal, but also part of an important government initiative.
The following day, March 19, 2010, the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times, ran a 3,300-word advertising supplement paid for by Mission Hills entitled “Golf Tees Off in China.” The five-page advertorial, which featured color photos of the clubhouse and the Blackstone Course, called the resort “Asia’s premier golfing destination” and mentioned multiple times that Mission Hills Haikou was “central to a government-led initiative to make the island into a sports and leisure capital.” A quote from Haikou Vice Mayor Zhu Hansong supported the claim, saying “both Mission Hills Haikou and the Omega Mission Hills World Cup are central features” of the government’s plans to “help promote Hainan around the world.” The piece mentioned that Mission Hills still had “grand plans” for the resort, but never mentioned more than the three completed courses. Ken Chu crowed happily about the big project: “Our reputation has earned us an early start in Haikou. The Hainan government was aware of the influential role we had played in stimulating investment and job creation in the Shenzhen area, and they were confident that our presence in Haikou would enjoy a similar effect. At the time of our launch, we will be employing forty thousand people in long-term, sustained jobs that will bring a renewed confidence and economic platform to further improve their lives.”
Of course, there were superlatives, including the “region’s largest aquatic and natural-spring development” featuring “Lava Lake,” a twelve-thousand-square-yard pool where one lap might take fifteen minutes. There was mention of “ten-thousand-year-old lava rock” that “greatly inspired” the resort’s golf courses and architecture. And Ken Chu himself spoke glowingly about the environs, saying he found Hainan “wonderfully charming,” before concluding, “The people are friendly, and life here is very much in harmony with nature.” The advertorial went on to call Mission Hills the “leading golf brand in the world” and deemed the one-day-old Hainan complex “one of the world’s most memorable golf resorts.”
It was like someone had flipped a switch. Just eight months earlier, Mission Hills Haikou was such a sensitive topic that Ken Chu denied its very existence. Now it was clear he and the rest of the family wanted everybody in the world to know about their newest resort. “They are advertising the hell out of that project now,” Martin said.
By late summer, billboards announcing the latest jewel in the Mission Hills crown adorned nearly every major airport in China. In Hainan, it was as though Mission Hills had staged a complete takeover of the Haikou airport. A billboard featuring twenty-three celebrity headshots and the upcoming “Star Trophy” tournament event was the first thing passengers saw in the arrivals area. The last thing they saw at baggage claim was a permanent Mission Hills Haikou shop of sorts, a remote lobby where you could book a room or a tee time. It was sharp-looking with glass sliding doors, wood paneling and an illuminated sign announcing that the club had been “unveiled.”
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Not long after the Mission Hills press conference, Martin said Hainan alone was building more golf courses than anywhere else in the world. “I wouldn’t doubt if there are one hundred golf courses under construction within Hainan within a year,” he said at the time. He added that the local government’s recent announcements had reinvigorated many of his projects, especially Mission Hills Haikou, where twenty-two courses now seemed like a possibility again.
But even something as simple as the number of golf courses at the resort was a moving target. The company line constantly changed. One day Ken Chu would say to go with ten; the next day it would be six. This remained the case long after the grand opening. A Star Trophy tournament staff member was reprimanded for allowing a camera crew from a major international TV station to film from the top floor of the hotel – the true scope of the project was apparently still top secret.
At one point, in an internal Flagstick newsletter, Martin wrote that his team was approaching the finish line on the first ten courses at Mission Hills Haikou.
“Martin, what are you writing that for?” he was asked. Apparently the rest of the world was only supposed to know about six courses. But many outsiders had already heard it was going to be thirty-six courses. And the resort website listed ten.
As they headed into the end of the year, there was talk about finishing those courses and adding two more – and doing it all in three months – for a total of twelve courses. But that never happened. Projects were stalled all over the country, even in Hainan, the future “Hawaii of the East.”
Just after Christmas, the Washington Post published a story talking about the “12-month frenzy of construction” on the island. As far as golf courses, the paper wrote, “26 are complete, and 70 others are underway.” Martin scoffed when he heard those numbers. “No fucking way,” he said. “Dream on. I’d be surprised if there were seventeen under construction.”
Even the seemingly unstoppable Mission Hills was running into roadblocks – literally. The resort seemed stuck on ten courses, a far cry from the twenty-two that everyone involved with the project thought was still the goal. Late in the year, Ken Chu had spent three days dealing with local government officials, trying to get some movement on the long-dormant southern portion of the property, where courses had been started but left to grow over due to what people close to the situation called “zillions of problems” relating to villager and government land disputes.
Chu was determined to force the government’s hand. He requested a fleet of heavy machinery – twenty excavators, several bulldozers and a tractor-trailer or two – to head down to the disputed land to make a statement. But the convoy couldn’t even make it through the gate. A large and determined crowd of villagers stood in the road and wouldn’t let the construction equipment pass.
Now, some workers who had originally expected to come back to work after the Chinese New Year had been told not to return until future notice.
The past few years under the artificial ban on golf course construction had been bizarrely good for business. But Martin couldn’t shake his belief that it would be much better if he and his colleagues had some kind of pathway to stable, long-term legitimacy for their profession in China. If Beijing acknowledged the inevitability of golf’s growth, and actually tried to control course development rather than ignore it, many in the industry would applaud the move. Tell them the hoops they need to jump through to build a 100-percent legal golf course in China, and they would jump through them, he said. Everyone was tired of living in limbo, tired of looking over their shoulders wondering when the government bulldozers and helicopters might arrive.