6
The Mountain Is High
Zhou Xunshu had all the physical tools. His swing looked homemade, but according to the American pro golfer Jim Johnson, one of the China Tour’s official coaches in 2007, it was “pretty solid, pretty simple. It works. It may look a little funny, but it is technically okay. He’s got a short backswing, but he’s really strong. His calves, they are like iron.” When he hooked Zhou up to his testing equipment, Johnson rated him to be the longest hitter on the China Tour.
After Qingdao, Zhou rattled off a string of solid showings, including an eighth place finish at Dragon Lake. But things really started to click for him in Kunming. It was August, and he was two-thirds of the way through the season. He was ranked fourteenth on the China Tour order of merit and sixteenth on the China Golf Association money list for the year. He needed to break into the top twelve for the year, or finish in the top three of a single tournament, to earn his professional player certification. The top twelve seemed within reach, but only if Zhou could keep up the momentum and rattle off a series of impressive performances leading up to the tour’s October finale in Beijing.
Zhou apparently didn’t want to wait that long. He seemed intent on doing things the quick way. At the Nick Faldo-designed Lakeview Golf Club near Kunming, he fired off his best ever opening round, holing four birdies en route to a 3-under 69. He entered the clubhouse with a share of the lead, and for the first time in three years on tour, he saw his name displayed in big characters on the leaderboard. At the end of the day, he was in a five-way tie for fourth place.
The round led to Zhou’s first ever in-tournament media interview, as well.
“Is not having sponsors difficult for you?” the female reporter asked.
“Yes, it is very hard. Some other golfers, after each tournament, they will have a rest and not leave until the next day,” he told her. “I need to go back to Chongqing the night the tournament finishes because I need to teach the next day. If I do not teach, I cannot make money.”
“How often are you able to practice?”
“Usually, I get up at 6:30 in the morning and go running as a way to maintain my fitness level. Then I eat breakfast at 7:30 and go to the driving range to practice until the noon. Then I start to teach in the afternoon, and sometimes I don’t stop until midnight.”
“Wow. So busy!”
“There is really not enough time in the day for me. Sometimes in the morning people will call me and ask for a lesson. And I can’t refuse or else people will judge me. And if I give a lesson in the morning, the whole order of my day is disturbed.”
“Have you thought about what you’d do with the prize money if you were to win the tournament?”
“I would definitely put it toward buying an apartment in Chongqing. But there are three days left – I can’t really think about this until the tournament is finished.”
And fortunes change fast in golf. One day you’re feared, the next day you’re forgotten. “Golf is the only sport I know of where a player pays for every mistake,” 1946 US Open winner Lloyd Mangrum once said. “In golf, every swing counts against you.” Sometimes, so do the trees. Friday started well for Zhou – he had carded three birdies on the front nine and was sitting in second place at 5 under par. Then a nightmare ninth hole took Zhou’s name off the leaderboard. He hooked his tee shot, which ran dogleg left, and his ball was nowhere to be found. After a long, frantic search, it was concluded that Zhou’s ball must have been lodged inside a knot of branches in one of the tall trees to the left of the fairway. So Zhou had to take a penalty stroke and tee off again. His following shot from the fairway landed in the sand trap before the green. He managed to chip a beautiful bunker shot, which landed three-and-a-half feet from the pin. But his putt lipped out and Zhou walked off the green with a 3-over 7. He slammed his putter into the grass, and then the pavement, repeatedly. He was out of the top ten. And then it started to rain.
That triple bogey stayed in his head throughout the back nine. He struggled with his driver, missing fairway after fairway. He found himself focusing on saving pars, and when he did give himself birdie chances, they barely missed. After six straight pars, he bogeyed the sixteenth hole after his tee shot sliced into the water. The rain really started to come down when he got to the seventeenth tee. He missed a fourteen-foot birdie putt on that hole, and on the eighteenth, Zhou put himself in an excellent position to enter the clubhouse at 1 over for the day, 2 under for the tournament. But play was halted before he could take a one-foot birdie putt. Thirty minutes later, Zhou’s “gimme” putt spun out. He let out a shout, tapped in for par and, frustrated, launched his ball into the water nearby. The day, which had begun with such promise, ended with him tied for sixteenth place overall, nine strokes behind the leader.
The best golfers are the ones who are good at forgetting, the ones who realize the only thing they can control is their attitude toward the next swing. Zhou lets things linger and stew. “Sometimes my mind is a mess out on the course,” he said. “I can get impatient and sometimes I just think too much. I let too many things into my mind. If I make a mistake, it’s hard for me to let it go. I keep thinking about it, and then I make more mistakes, and then I get angry about them.”
Zhou said golf was different than other sports, like basketball or football. To do well in golf, he believed, you first need to “conquer yourself.” That had proved difficult for him – his head could put up quite a fight. But he managed to rebound from his rough Friday outing and finished the tournament in a five-way tie for ninth. It was his second top-ten finish of the year and earned him 12,860 yuan before taxes. On the Omega China Tour Order of Merit, he inched up to the thirteenth spot.
He was looking more like a certified pro golfer with each match.
*
Golf legend Bobby Jones said, “You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.” With that golf truth in mind, it’s no surprise Zhou wasn’t swinging his best at the close of the 2007 season – his head was overflowing.
“We’re going to have an Olympic baby,” Zhou announced over dinner on the eve of the opening round of the tour’s late-September stop in Xiamen, a picturesque port city on China’s southeastern coast. Liu Yan was two months pregnant, due in April 2008. It was auspicious – but the news required some changes in their situation. “Also, we’re getting married. Probably in November, before she gets too big,” he said.
Zhou had cobbled together enough money – through their own savings, and loans from friends and relatives – to buy an apartment in a Chongqing high-rise. So they were moving, too. Liu Yan’s parents had only slowly warmed to Zhou, and a house was a prerequisite for getting married.
“He is too old,” Liu Yan’s father had said once he met his daughter’s boyfriend for the first time, when Zhou had traveled to her village in Hunan for Spring Festival in 2005. In China, an age difference of three or five years was acceptable. The twelve years that separated Liu Yan and Zhou was too much. Zhou was very nervous on that visit. He was afraid Liu Yan’s father wouldn’t approve of the relationship and would kick him out. So Zhou behaved himself. He washed the food, and he washed the dishes. He worked very hard to win over her family. Yet Liu Yan’s father didn’t talk to him during the visit. Not a word. “Why bother talking to him?” Liu Yan’s father told her. “I don’t like him.”
Her father was more opposed to the relationship than her mother. Her mother’s greatest fear, according to Liu Yan, was that if Zhou’s finances didn’t improve, they might not visit Hunan very often, especially after they had a child. And Liu Yan knew her parents wouldn’t want to move to Chongqing. Hunan was their home.
One day, Liu Yan called her father in tears, knowing he still didn’t approve of the relationship. He responded with an ultimatum for Zhou. “If you want to marry my daughter, you need to buy a house first. And you can’t move back to your hometown,” he said. Her father was especially suspicious of the fact that Zhou came from Guizhou. He had traveled through the province during the 1970s, and said he never wanted his daughter to live there. “I know that place,” he said. “Not good!” Her father said until Zhou bought a house he would withhold the family hukou, or household registration certificate, a document necessary to get married in China. And so Zhou scrimped and saved and borrowed so he and Liu Yan could get married.
After that, Liu Yan’s parents started to change their minds. Liu Yan’s brother, Liu Jun, had a lot to do with it, she said. Zhou was “honest and nice,” he insisted. It was yuan fen for Liu Yan and Zhou to be together. Zhou was “not the kind of guy who would play tricks,” he told them. Eventually, her parents decided to just let it go. However, Zhou still had to buy a house for their daughter.
So, as play began in Xiamen, Zhou’s focus was elsewhere. If the profanity spewing from Zhou’s mouth wasn’t sign enough, his body language declared he was a man ready for the season to be over. After one of his seven second-round bogeys, he kicked an empty water bottle angrily down the cart path. It was only Friday, but he went ahead and booked his return flight for Sunday, the last day of play, choosing an early departure time on the assumption that he wouldn’t be among those in the late groups battling for the title.
“What if you end up winning the championship?” another golfer asked Zhou.
“If I win the championship, I wouldn’t care about the money I wasted on the ticket,” he replied. Then Zhou turned his golf cap to the side and added, “But look at me. Do I look like a champion?”
Zhou didn’t feel like a champion, and that is what mattered. Later, on his way back to the hotel in a taxi, he sighed and said, “I need to figure some things out.”
Zhou didn’t need to worry about rescheduling his flight. He finished tied for twenty-ninth, his worst China Tour finish since the season opener in Nanjing. At the airport, Zhou was antsy. He couldn’t sit still. He stood in front of a glass fire extinguisher case on the wall and practiced his swing in the reflection. “I really hate waiting for flights,” Zhou said. “I’m too impatient.”
So, too, it seemed, were all of his fellow passengers. Before any rows were called for boarding, and despite the fact that all seats were pre-assigned, everyone rushed the gate and an anxious mob formed around the ticket taker. Zhou, now a seasoned traveler, remained seated and looked on disapprovingly.
“Nongmin,” he said shaking his head at the crowd. “Peasants.”
*
The 2007 season finale, the Omega Championship, took place in Beijing just a few weeks before Zhou and Liu Yan’s wedding. It was cold and windy, with gusts reaching more than thirty miles per hour. Yellow and brown leaves fluttered across the tournament fairway; the seasons were changing, and Zhou’s golf season, for all intents and purposes, was already over. Zhou shot an 83 and an 82 and missed the cut for the first time all year. Mentally, he had checked out.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Zhou hadn’t been practicing as much as usual. The collective stress, which had been simmering for some time, began to boil over, causing little trivial tiffs back home with Liu Yan.
“Sometimes I think being single is best for a professional golfer,” he said. “You don’t need to think about anything, just spending the whole day practicing and at night have fun and relax or whatever. But having a family is just different. Sometimes even when I hear my phone ring I become very uneasy. It doesn’t mean her calling me is annoying, it is just that little things start to add up, and indirectly this affects my mood.”
Zhou’s poor finish to the season pushed him out of the top twenty on the China Tour’s money list. He failed to earn his elusive pro card.
“There were some successes and some failures,” Zhou said, looking back. “The good part is I am improved. Kunming was a pity. That tree. I let one ball affect my mood the rest of the way.”
He hadn’t learned to let go.
*
Originally, Zhou and Liu Yan had wanted to schedule the ceremony for November 11, the anniversary of the day they officially professed their love for each other, back in 2004 at Dragon Lake Golf Club. But the restaurant they were looking at wasn’t available that day, so they had to settle for November 10. “I was very irritated,” Zhou said. “Just little things like that really bother me.”
They didn’t expect many people at the wedding. Many of Zhou’s friends in Guangzhou couldn’t make it, and they hadn’t lived in Chongqing long enough to have a large group of acquaintances. He wasn’t sure if his parents would be able to attend. Liu Yan’s father had already told them that he couldn’t get away – he was too busy overseeing the remodeling of the family house. He’d bought the materials himself and hired workers, and didn’t trust them to use the materials correctly without his oversight. “No time. No other way. Mei banfa!” he had told Liu Yan. Her mother made the journey from Hunan with Liu Yan’s brother and his wife.
Zhou and Liu Yan were married in a large private dining room in a downtown high-rise. It was a small yet colorful affair, a Chongqing take on a Western-style wedding, if some aspects of the evening seemed to happen in reverse. The couple arrived in a rented white Mercedes-Benz. The guests waited outside the building entrance, armed with confetti and streamers, pieces of which stayed attached to the bride and groom for the remainder of the afternoon. In the lobby, the couple welcomed their guests in a receiving line of sorts, with Liu Yan lighting cigarettes for all.
The dining room, which served as a setting for both the wedding ceremony and the celebratory meal, was awash in pink. At the back of the room stood an archway covered in fake flowers and pink chiffon. The front of the room was all pink curtains. The showpiece was a large portrait of Zhou and Liu Yan, framed by a ring of pink feathers and accented by strings of white holiday lights.
There were seven tables for the fifty or so guests, among them just a couple of Zhou’s fellow golfers from the China Tour. At the center of each table the guests found a bottle of Sprite, a bottle of Pepsi, a bottle of Changyu Pioneer red wine, a box of baijiu, a pack of Double Happiness cigarettes and a bowl with an assortment of peanuts, sunflower seeds and candy. Loud English-language pop music billowed from several speakers.
Zhou wore a black pinstriped suit with a yellow shirt and silver tie. Liu Yan looked lovely in a lacy white wedding dress with a veil and dangling crystal jewelry. But this was, by and large, not a formal affair. Many guests wore jeans. Some had sneakers on.
When everyone was seated at their tables, the couple walked down the aisle together, from the pink archway to the wall of pink curtains. The marriage ceremony was conducted via microphone by an offstage emcee. This was followed by a traditional tea-drinking ceremony and a series of modern additions: a champagne tower; a bouquet toss; a bubble machine; a wardrobe change; more confetti; and dinner. Then the baijiu flowed. A couple of the guests passed out before dark.
Zhou and Liu Yan couldn’t have been more in love. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to be there to see it. Zhou’s parents couldn’t make the journey from Qixin.
*
Zhou and Liu Yan’s apartment was 1,300 square feet on the ninth floor of a thirty-story building. Zhou would have liked to buy a flat on a higher level for the resale value, were he not deathly afraid of heights – strange for a guy who grew up on the side of a mountain. “Even with a balcony or a window,” Zhou said, “when I get closer to the edge I just feel like my flesh is falling off my body, one layer at a time.” The ninth floor was high enough for Zhou, who, if he stood on his balcony a safe distance from the rail, could crane his neck and see a sliver of netting and green grass on the driving range where he worked. The rest was obscured by another high-rise apartment building. There were high-rises everywhere, tall, boxy and new. Just a few years earlier, this area had been all but empty.
With all the changes in his life, Zhou hadn’t been able to practice all winter. Decorating his new apartment in Chongqing turned into a long ordeal. For several months he was forced to monitor it on his own. That was because Liu Yan had returned home to her parents’ village, Tanzishan, in Hunan province, for their baby’s birth.
Liu Yan’s childhood had been pretty happy, so it was hard for her to imagine what life had been like for her father when he was young. He was born in the 1950s and came of age in Chairman Mao’s China. He would tell Liu Yan about those days, and how hard they were. His family often didn’t have enough wheat, so they ate the chaff. It wasn’t just his family that was so hard hit; everyone in the area was relying on the chaff to survive. Liu Yan’s mother told her this was because corrupt local officials kept all the real food for themselves. Sometimes, as a child, Liu Yan’s father was so constipated from not eating enough fiber that his father had to use a finger to dig the feces out of him. “When I think about this, it makes me want to cry,” Liu Yan said.
He’d had no childhood. He had started working when he was five years old, pulling his father’s cart in the fields. He quit school after the third grade and left home at a very young age to earn money. When he was ten he found a job as a laborer on a reservoir construction site, carrying sand and rocks from one place to another. He worked every day but Sunday.
In his teens, he had bounced from one job to another. He sold lumber, medicine, chickens; he even sold ice cream for a while. To do business, he traveled across China, to places like Guangdong, Guangxi and Zhou’s family’s province, Guizhou. When he was twenty he saw that there was money to be made selling eggs wholesale. Every day, he’d take eggs from Hunan across the border, to cities like Zhanjiang in Guangdong province. After about ten years selling chicken eggs, he’d saved enough – sixty thousand yuan – to build the only house Liu Yan could remember from her own childhood. It was three stories tall, one of the nicest buildings in the village at the time.
Liu Yan’s parents told her that things started to get better in 1979 and 1980, when the land was divided among the people. People in the village started to build more houses, and very few of them were made of earth, as was common before. The main road, which had once been very narrow, was widened. Soon enough, it would run all the way to Guilin, in Guangxi. In 1994, Liu Yan’s father and seven friends took advantage of Deng’s “opening up” reforms to start a small business. They built a red brick factory on some old farmland. Business was good for a while, but then the area’s earth no longer produced the clay to make the bricks. Now, her father kept chickens on the land near the factory, but it wasn’t enough to support the family. So he started to sell fertilizer and collect recycling – mostly bottles and cardboard. He also fixed watches.
Liu Yan had come to realize her father had been worried about Zhou because it had been so hard for her family in the old days. Her father wanted the best for his only daughter, and this older man, from a poor family, with an unstable job playing a game he’d never heard of, was not the son-in-law of his dreams. If he was honest, though, Liu Yan’s father saw a little bit of himself in Zhou. When he was courting Liu Yan’s mother, he didn’t have money either, and no one in her family approved of their relationship. Over the months, Liu Yan’s parents had come to respect Zhou’s drive and determination. And now that she was expecting a baby, Liu Yan felt sure she could count on her father’s support.
She was due in a couple of months, and she already knew she was expecting a son. She’d had two ultrasounds, and the doctors weren’t supposed to tell her the baby’s sex, but, she said, “This is the countryside, and things are a little different.”
There was less pressure in the village. The pace of life was less intense. She was going to stay in Tanzishan for a month or two after the birth, following the tradition of zuo yuezi, or confinement. During that time, her mother would take care of her and the new baby. Plus, although Zhou was insisting that he and Liu Yan take care of their baby on their own, he was busy – decorating the apartment, yes, but also teaching and training. And the 2008 China Tour would start up right after the baby’s due date.
Still, Liu Yan was eager to get back to Chongqing. “Every day here is kind of dull. Sometimes I help my mother in the kitchen. Sometimes I just stand on the balcony and stare at the road and the train tracks, and the smokestack from the chemical factory. After nine o’clock at night, you can’t see any lights on the road. By that time, most of the people here have already gone to bed,” she said.
“The city is more convenient, more exciting. In Chongqing, I can go out shopping for fun. I can read books. The village doesn’t even have a book store.”
Liu Yan’s mother said that Tanzishan hadn’t grown as fast as other villages nearby. She blamed the local government officials for this – they were corrupt, she said, one thing that hadn’t changed since the old days.
*
Despite Beijing’s golf course moratorium, some big developers continued to show a remarkable ability to manage and massage guanxi with local government officials. Without the right connections, it would never have been possible to operate on the grand scale needed to build a golf resort. And managing and massaging guanxi was often a very tangible business. Sources familiar with one company said that before launching a large golf course construction project in Guangdong, the developer outfitted the local police department with a new fleet of motorcycles. On Hainan island, it was said the company built the county a brand new government office building during the negotiations over another large golf-related development. That land deal fell through, but the building, or at least the shell of it, remained. “It’s sitting there like a big old white elephant,” a local source said. “That’s development in China right there.”
Most successful developers have at least one person, if not a team of three or four, whose only job is to maintain solid relationships with – if not blatantly pay off – the local officials who sign off on various aspects of development projects, regardless of the directives from Beijing. These staffers call themselves CEOs, “chief entertainment officers,” because they’re constantly picking up the tab for meals, drinks and trips to the local karaoke joint (“chief enticement officer” might be a better title). First, there’s the money that changes hands while a project is trying to get approved, and then there’s the money that changes hands while the project is trying to avoid being shut down. “It’s just to keep the trucks going, keep the villagers out of the way, secure the land,” a source said. “It’s just one thing after another.”
There was one project on the mainland where the owner didn’t play the game well with the local government, and to onlookers it was clear from early on that “the job would go on forever.” Relatively minor land issues with villagers went unresolved because the owner was “tighter than hell” and “always trying to negotiate down to nothing.” Everything with the owner “just takes forever and ever and ever,” a source said. “He will always have problems,” the person added.
Some successful developers, on the other hand, weren’t afraid to throw money at problems. They often realized that a big outlay of money now would likely save them from expensive delays later. “At the end of the day, they’re doing it the right way – for China,” a source said. “I mean, it’s just the money they’d lose by having all these people out there and delaying the project and all. You know, they’ve done it. They’ve been there. They’re the experts on it.”
Developers have been known to name a local village head as a subcontractor on critical projects. The village head makes somewhere on the order of five yuan per day for every villager he brings onto the project as a laborer, and that quickly adds up – at certain points during construction, a massive development can have thousands of local villagers on the payroll. The village head is indebted to the developer, and the developer knows it has someone who will defend the project if and when land issues arise. When disputes with villagers escalated at Haikou, one call from Mission Hills was all it took to get busloads of local officials on the scene to work things out.
Developers “know all the games to play,” one contractor said. “That’s just the China way.”
Of course, there are times when problems don’t get worked out, regardless of how much money gets thrown at them. A prime example was a monster project that Martin Moore had worked on. The owner was a billionaire real estate tycoon, one of the richest men in China. He had dreams as big as his bank account, and set his sights on a prime piece of land, a spot so beautiful that it could have been part of a national park. It had everything – steep cliff faces, stunning mountain views from almost every angle and, at the center of it all, a large meandering lake that would bring water into play on nearly every hole. He hired one of the world’s most celebrated golf course architects to draw up a signature design. And he was busy buying up decaying resorts all over the area. He hoped this would be the first of as many as six golf courses he’d build there. Big numbers like this were becoming common in China – everyone was chasing after the Chus.
But Martin’s experienced eye saw problems lurking at the site from the start. Right where the course’s first three holes would be, there was a well-established village, whose residents also claimed some ownership of various other sections of the course. When Martin first arrived, he noticed several villagers had begun to build new, taller homes – a sure sign they were trying to score larger relocation settlements. Martin could tell these villagers were well informed, and canny. They weren’t going down without a fight.
Then there was the rest of the course, hugging the lake, which happened to be connected upstream to a large reservoir. At the moment, the land was dry. The water was about five yards lower than what was considered “safe” for the course from a flooding perspective. But Martin had taken a look at the historical records and found that about a dozen years earlier the lake had risen to around ten yards above the “safe” level. The tycoon assured Martin and his crew that he had an arrangement with the local authorities: should the water start to flood the course, they’d open up the dam at the far end of the lake and draw the water down to a manageable level. Martin was skeptical.
The course ended up being one of the most drawn-out construction projects of Martin’s career, spanning nearly five years. The delays were partly due to the weather. Brutal winters froze the ground and covered the course with snow, completely shutting down construction for several months each year. But the biggest issue was the land disputes that bedeviled the project from day one.
It was a story Martin had heard several times before. The owner says he paid the government for the land. The villagers say they didn’t get paid, or that they weren’t paid enough. “I know the owner is just out millions [for the land],” Martin said. “Say he pays a million out, and he gives it to his two or three people who deal with the government. How much do they take? And they go and pay the government. How much does the government take? By the time it gets down to these villagers, I mean, you know, two-thirds, three-quarters of it’s gone. And those guys don’t get shit.”
Not far from the existing village, the owner built what Martin described as “a whole city” with “US townhouses.” The villagers refused to move to them.
“I don’t blame them,” Martin said. “Better or not better, it’s not their home. Some of these little villages, they’re fourth or fifth generation.”
While the bickering between the local government and the villagers raged on, Martin’s team built “temporary” versions of holes No. 1, 2 and 3 in a valley far enough from the village to be considered untouchable. But the rest of the project was a constant game of stop-and-start. They waited for the tycoon to say which parts of the land were approved for construction. They would get word that the spats had been settled and it was time to go ahead. Then Martin’s crew would find protesters waiting for them at the job site.
“They would block the roads,” Martin said. “As soon as you went out there and had equipment running, they would all come up.” The confrontations didn’t become physical, but they were effective nonetheless. Martin said he instructed his guys “to just do what they say, you know. Never told them to challenge them or anything.”
Construction “came to a complete halt” after villagers took their case to the central government in Beijing. That move put the project, once hidden away in the mountains, in the spotlight – China Central Television even came out to report a story. The unwanted attention couldn’t have come at a worse time. Beijing had just launched what looked like another serious crackdown on golf development, and the tycoon’s dream course was an easy target for the capital’s “golf police.” The owner scrambled to get more approvals and permits to clear the way, but as Martin pointed out, “none of them were for golf, obviously.” There were no official permits for golf courses being issued in those days.
Soon, Martin’s crew noticed helicopters flying overhead with some regularity. “The owner’s people told us to fill in all the bunkers and plant grass over them,” he said. “They told us to put dirt over all the cart paths. They said they didn’t want it to look like a golf course. I thought it was the stupidest thing – there’s no way you’re going to disguise this so it’s not a golf course.”
While Martin began to question whether the project would ever reach the finish line, the owner continued to dream the way only a billionaire can. His first course may be in jeopardy, but that wouldn’t stop him from thinking about courses No. 2, No. 3 and beyond. He had representatives from every celebrity designer out to visit the site, from Greg Norman to Tiger Woods. “Give him credit,” Martin said of the tycoon, “he’s got an imagination. He can sit there and think.” Sometimes, though, imagination coupled with a seemingly endless budget can drive a person a little crazy. “Can we put a waterfall here?” was one of the owner’s favorite questions. Waterfalls, unfortunately, couldn’t hide a course from the golf police.
Although the village itself never moved, the land disputes and the scrutiny from the authorities eventually died down enough to where Martin’s team could finish the course. The result was beautiful. Many who saw it thought it might be one of the best in China – and it had better have been. The owner had spent forty million dollars on the project, more than four times what was considered expensive in this country.
But then it started to rain. And the water began to rise, well beyond the “safe” level. The government didn’t do a thing, and the entire golf course was submerged in four yards of water.
“It’s ruined,” Martin said. “Simply the opening of a gate would save him forty million dollars. And he obviously doesn’t have the pull to make that happen. The government’s in a bind. If the local government opens the gate and lets the water down to save an illegal golf course, there’d be some definite ramifications there.”
The tycoon refused to give up, however. He hired the same designer to route another nine holes on the side of a mountain, six yards above the high-water mark. He thought another thirty million dollars would be enough to make it happen.
*
Ken Chu was certainly not the only Chinese golf course owner with high expectations. Take the golf course developer everybody called “the Chairman,” whose boardroom antics made Donald Trump look like Donald Duck. The Chairman was a pedant for punctuality. If someone arrived a second late for a meeting, his security guards blocked them from entering via the main door to the boardroom. Instead, he or she would have to go outside and walk around the side of the building to an alternate entrance. That door led the person upstairs, then downstairs, before finally reaching the back door to the boardroom. That forced the latecomer to enter the room from behind the Chairman’s custom-made leather executive chair, which extended two feet over the top of the Chairman’s head. The twenty to forty pairs of eyes around the table would avoid catching the gaze of the late arrival as he or she slipped into the room.
The latecomer would take a chair at the table, but without any formal acknowledgment from the Chairman or the assembled senior staff. For a while the meeting would carry on normally, often with a PowerPoint presentation projected on a screen. The Chairman demanded all presentations come with visual aids, giving him a reason to use his beloved laser pointers, of which a multicolored collection was always lined up neatly on the table in front of him. And then, sometimes, the Chairman would issue a fine or two. For example, if some work wasn’t completed because a fleet of trucks didn’t make it to the site, the Chairman would single out the person responsible, slam the table and say, “You’re fined! Two thousand yuan!” This was business as usual at the Chairman’s weekly meetings.
Five minutes or so later, however, the Chairman would pounce on the latecomer. No matter the person’s position within the company, or the country on his or her passport, the humiliation was the same. The Chairman would abruptly stop the meeting and “chew them out big time,” Martin reported. At very least, the latecomer would be told to spend the remainder of the meeting, which would often go on for two hours, standing at his or her seat. Usually, however, the Chairman would tell the person to stand in the corner facing the wall “like you’re in kindergarten.” Staff being disciplined, with their backs to the rest of the group, would have to shout updates into the room’s luscious wood paneling.
“Everything he does is like to show everyone, ‘I’m the king. I’ve got all the power. I can do anything I want to do,’” Martin said. “They all want to look good in front of their whole staff, and if he can make a foreigner do what he says, he’s really the king, you know.”
The Chairman took aim at Martin’s American project manager on a couple of occasions. Tardy for the weekly meeting, the manager had to take the walk of shame, knowing full well what would follow. He took his seat, and waited. Several minutes went by and then the Chairman, with the face of a disappointed parent, looked at the project manager and spoke. A young woman sitting next to the Chairman translated.
“The Chairman said because you arrived late to the meeting, you must stand up now,” she said.
The project manager had discussed the possibility of such an occurrence with Martin beforehand.
“Martin, do I really have to stand if I am late for a meeting?” he had asked.
“That’s up to you,” Martin said. “You don’t have to. But I’ll say one thing. If he does stand you there and point you out like that, and you take it like everyone else does, you’ll earn so much respect from him.”
So Martin’s project manager got up from his seat and stood there at the conference for the remaining ninety minutes of the meeting.
A couple weeks later, the project manager’s driver was delayed and he arrived late for the meeting once again. This time, as he walked in behind the Chairman, the project manager just said, “I know. I know. I’ve got to stand up.”
The group emitted a rare collective chuckle.
“The Chairman would like to know why you were late,” the translator said.
The project manager explained about the driver.
“Okay, the Chairman said you can sit down,” the translator said.
“No, I was late. I’ll stand.”
The two, via the translator, went back and forth like that for a while.
“Part of it is a game, you know,” Martin said. “Part of it is you’re trying to figure out someone’s personality. I know what the Chairman’s like. I’m not going to challenge him. And I’m not going to argue with him. If you go in there and say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to stand over there,’ or something like that, I mean, you’re done. You’re done forever. But if you stand up and you make him look good in front of all his staff, like, ‘I made the foreigners look bad,’ he’ll love you. That’ll last so long.”
The Chairman has been known to take his executives on impromptu extreme-team-building exercises, including eight-hour hikes in the mountains. “Some people pass out,” Martin said. “And when it’s all done, he thinks it brings all of them closer together.”
The Chairman was a small man, but he lived large. Among his fleet of automobiles was a one-million-dollar luxury sedan the size of a Hong Kong studio apartment. It featured fully reclining rear seats and multiple flatscreen TVs. Front to back, the car measured a titanic 6.2 yards; so long, in fact, that it qualified as a truck in several Chinese cities. Officially, it was required to display the yellow license plate usually reserved for trucks and buses, but the Chairman had no intention of having his luxury car lumped in with working class vehicles, so he chose to go without a license plate at all.
“I don’t think anyone stops him,” Martin said.
The same could be said of the Chairman’s accountant. “He goes all out,” Martin said. “He’s a big spender.” When his celebrity course designer is visiting and the Chairman takes his team out to dinner, it’s nothing for him to drop seventy thousand dollars on a table of twelve. It’s abalone. It’s the finest wines. It’s a different world.
Martin recalled a conversation he had with the course designer’s No. 2 man, not long after such a meal.
“You know that meal we had last week?” the man said.
“Yeah,” Martin replied. “It was pretty good.”
“It was sixty-five thousand dollars. Those bottles of wine we drank? They were twenty-eight hundred dollars apiece. We had fourteen of them.”
When VIPs came to visit, the Chairman was known to splash out on lavish gifts, items worth ten thousand dollars or more, like jade golf balls or gold swords.
But the Chairman was modest in comparison to some of China’s tycoons. Another golf course owner was “richer than all of them,” said Martin. His company’s website boasted about a $57 million private jet and a thirty-five-foot yacht, purchased from a celebrity athlete for $20 million.
Meetings with this owner were also an experience. They required a meeting about the meeting, the evening before the meeting, to discuss “what’s going to be talked about, what we can say, what we can’t say.” It was common for the owner’s staff to go without sleep during the twenty-four hours leading up to a meeting, regardless of its significance or urgency – every meeting the owner attended was significant and urgent. Everything needed to be perfect.
One time, a meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m., but it was made clear to Martin that arriving after 8 a.m. was unacceptable. The morning of the meeting, he realized why. While there were only sixteen participants, there were probably a couple dozen additional people scurrying around the place, adjusting this, fixing that. There were two men assigned to placing the attendees around the table. Like persnickety wedding planners, they told Martin and the others not just where to sit, but how.
“You,” they’d say. “Move your chair two inches to the right.”
“You. Move that laptop three inches to the left.”
“You. No iPads allowed.”
Everyone was told that if they planned to take notes during the meeting, they were only permitted to do so on paper featuring the name and logo of the owner’s company, using similarly branded pencils and pens. All these items, Martin noticed, were laid out neatly on the table in front of him. So much activity, and the meeting hadn’t even started yet.
This was an introductory meeting, the kickoff to the construction project, and the owner wasted no time dressing down his staff, who had worked so hard to make the meeting a success. He mentioned Martin’s experience at Spring City, and discussed the impressive resumé of the foreign management team the owner had hired to oversee things. “My team is bad,” the owner said to the room filled with many members of his team. “They have failed in the past. So now we’re bringing in a whole new team.” Then he addressed his staff specifically, “I suggest you all watch and learn.”
When he wasn’t talking, the owner puffed on a clunky Sherlock Holmes-style calabash pipe incessantly for the duration of the three-hour meeting. He came prepared for the long haul, too. He had a rotation of three pipes, tended by two young women whose sole role at the meeting was to see that the owner’s pipe was always full and firing. Several times during the meeting, the owner would abruptly hold his pipe above his head. Instantly, one of the minders would appear, take the spent pipe from the owner’s hand and replace it with a freshly packed one. She’d hold a flame to the new pipe as the owner took his first puffs. Then she’d disappear again.
*
People unfamiliar with the way China works often express confusion as to how a country can experience a golf course boom during a moratorium on golf course construction. Those who’ve spent more than five minutes in China do not suffer from such confusion. In fact, the Chinese have several sayings for the disconnect that often exists between Beijing’s best intentions and how they’re interpreted – or simply ignored – out in the provinces:
上有政策, 下有对策 (Shang you zheng ce, xia you dui ce)
Where there are policies from above, there are counter-policies from below.政令不出中南海 (Zheng ling bu chu zhong nan hai)
Policies and commands stop at the gate of Zhongnanhai.山高皇帝远 (Shan gao huang di yuan)
The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.
Simply put, golf courses can’t be built in China without major government involvement, but that involvement is always at the local level. Indeed, local officials will often seek out golf-based real estate developments, believing them to be magnets for high-end businesses and a well-to-do clientele, not to mention major generators of tax revenues. That’s because golf isn’t taxed like a sport in China; it’s taxed as an entertainment venue, similar to a karaoke club, at a hefty 23.5 percent rate. In recent years, some local governments have begun offering special deals or incentives that bring this down to a more manageable rate, around 10 percent. One developer likened golf in China to prostitution. “That’s illegal, too,” he said. “But there are still prostitutes everywhere in this country.”
But, perhaps most importantly, local governments welcome land-hungry developments, such as those that involve golf, because they own the land. Ministry of Land Resources data and Chinese media reports in recent years suggest that anywhere between 20 to 50 percent of annual revenues enjoyed by local governments in China come from the sale of land. That doesn’t take into account the amount officials pocket on the sly, of course. “These local governments, they want money,” a contractor working in Hainan explained. “All the chiefs, all the mayors, they’re making tons of money on this stuff. Why are they not going to let it happen?” Another golf industry professional noted that the term limits set for local government officials encouraged a sort of “race” mentality – “I’ve got three years to make as much money as I can” is common thinking among bureaucrats.
Local governments are typically willing to “fudge things” in an effort to, literally and figuratively, get the ball rolling on lucrative land development. The benefits, most reckon, outweigh the risks, even the risk that Beijing might crack down on a project that is technically illegal. But the governments are also sly. The first rule when planning a golf course in China: Don’t use the world “golf.”
“It didn’t go away – the moratorium is still there,” one industry pro reported. “People just figure out other ways to do it. No one calls it a ‘golf course’ now. It’s green space, it’s equestrian, it’s an exercise field. They are creative. But the government knows. It’s just all about loop holes.”
The government office tasked with attracting investment to a district on the outskirts of Haikou, not far from the Mission Hills site in Hainan, had learned the tricks.
One official said that, while most of the prime shoreline properties on the island had already been snatched up, they still had “plenty” of plots dominated by volcanic rock, which is useless for growing crops. Farmland and forest were off-limits to investors, but this land was available.
What if an American company wanted to build a golf course on it?
“Foreign companies can’t build golf courses,” he said. “In China, there is a restriction on golf.”
What about Mission Hills?
“They are a domestic company, and they are not doing golf.”
What were they doing then?
“Leisure!” he said with a wink. “Just don’t mention golf.”
To get around the restrictions, savvy developers would label their projects as “resorts.” The official explained: “Plant some flowers and trees, no problem. And maybe some people grab a club and hit a ball. That’s just leisure.” The official, tall and tanned with a relaxed demeanor, mentioned that he played golf a couple times a month.
The agreement between Mission Hills and Hainan’s Xiuying District, which administered much of the land in question for Project 791, never once used the world “golf.” The document, according to one of the first investigative stories about it, which appeared in the China Youth Daily newspaper, described a “land consolidation” project that would feature “sports and leisure,” “health facilities,” “culture and entertainment,” “leisure and business,” “international competitions,” “conferences and exhibitions,” “creative industries” and “suitable living.” The agreement suggested the project would create a “new type of tourism,” which would “improve the production and living standards of the local farmers and promote the building of a new socialist countryside.” The contract went so far as to label Project 791 as “ecological restoration.” The development, the document argued, would “improve the ecological environment” of the area, which ranged from north of Volcano Crater National Park to far south of Wang Libo’s village, Meiqiu.
*
Wang was aware of the tenuous grip he had on his family’s land. It had been theirs for decades – centuries, in the case of some plots. But he saw the writing on the wall.
And so, despite concerns about the legacy he’d leave for his children, despite his suspicion he wasn’t getting a fair price for his land, and despite his reluctance to say goodbye to the money-earning lychee trees that grew on some of his acreage, he did what he could to speed up the land sale process, not long after the meeting under the phoenix tree.
“The developers and the government negotiated this deal without any discussions with the villagers,” he said. “And the land payouts were set by the government. How can I bargain with them? How can I protest and fight against the government and the rich people? They are too powerful to be challenged. What is best for me is go with the trend. So I never protested. I invited the land-measuring team from the town government. Also I invited the town-level official to verify the measuring process on the spot. After they finished, I signed my name and got the money. It’s best to go with the government, and figure out a new way to make a living.”
Not everyone took Wang’s approach. In late March 2008, riots broke out in the village of Yongdong, four miles northeast of Meiqiu. Hundreds of villagers, some wielding machetes and other farming tools, took to Changqiao Hill in an attempt to stop the Mission Hills construction crew from working on their land. The villagers were enraged by rumors that the per-mu prices presented to them by the local government were nowhere near the amount Mission Hills had paid. Indeed, a public document on the website of the Haikou city government listed the benchmark land prices for business development in the Yongdong area as 135,000 to 150,000 yuan per mu – about $19,000 to $22,000. For Meiqiu it was higher still: 145,000 to 185,000 yuan per mu. No one knows for sure what Mission Hills actually paid, but with villagers only getting 12,500 to 29,000 per mu, a lot of cash was getting caught up somewhere else.
When the local police arrived at Yongdong, protesters smashed and overturned some of their cars. Then the military police showed up and dispersed the crowd with tear gas. Several villagers were arrested, fined and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for inciting a crowd to disturb social order, and willful destruction of public property. Years after the incident, a slogan remained emblazoned on the side of a prominent building in the village: “Yongdong Must Be United Together!”
News of the Yongdong protest spread quickly to Meiqiu, where villagers were angry about many of the same issues. Those who didn’t agree to sell their land, or those who were holding out in the hope of getting more money, were often among the first to find their land had been bulldozed. “You have to sell, because they force you,” one villager said. “Without your agreement, they bulldoze the lands then give you your money. Otherwise, the police will trouble you.”
In fact, this had happened to one of Wang’s friends. His land was full of lychee trees that were still weeks away from being ready to harvest. Yet the bulldozers were called in. In less than an hour, his fruit trees were gone, as was his potential income for the summer. That left him with no option but to accept the government’s price. What good was his land to him now?
“Why couldn’t they negotiate with him?” Wang asked. “Why couldn’t they wait two months and let him reap his fruit? What made it worse was that after they bulldozed his land, they didn’t touch it again for several months. It was such a pity.”
Meiqiu was quite a bit smaller than Yongdong and couldn’t muster a demonstration of comparable size. There were a few dustups here and there, but a couple dozen farmers usually proved no match for men in bulldozers and the Mission Hills security force.
Several of these small protests took place not far from a piece of land that Wang owned the rights to. It was an odd, triangle-shaped property originally intended to be part of the Mission Hills project, until the villagers successfully made a last-minute push to move the Red Line ever so slightly away from Meiqiu before the deal was finalized in late 2007. Wang wasn’t sure what to do with the land. It was right next to the cement road, and full of weeds and wild fruit trees too young to be reaped, with a construction site directly behind it. Wang didn’t know much about golf, but he was pretty sure that what he saw going on behind his property wasn’t golf. A concrete foundation was being laid. He had some construction experience, and he could tell that whatever was going up was going to be huge. Wang knew what he had to do: build a wall.
Usually in China, golf course developers built walls to keep the riffraff out. This time it was the villager trying to keep the golf course at bay. They’ve already taken enough of my land, Wang thought as he laid brick on top of brick, just as he had so many thousands of times before. They’re not going to take any more. As Wang built his wall, he watched as another mini protest broke out in a contested clearing nearby. It was peaceful, like most of them had been. But, Wang thought, it was also hopeless, like all the others had been. Why yell at the bulldozer driver? Why yell at the security guards? They were probably just villagers, too.
Wang felt for the protestors, and he agreed with them in many ways. But he also believed they were just prolonging the inevitable.