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‌Time to Make Claims

The man wearing a tank top and surfing shorts would normally have been busy shaping a golf hole, but on this day, with a bag of golf clubs slung over one shoulder, he had decided to spend the afternoon playing some of his recent creations. He didn’t have the day off; he just had nothing else to do. “Dozer is down again,” he said with a shrug.

Nearly three years into his first golf course in China, this veteran American shaper had come to expect delays. The broken bulldozer was just the start. Progress on the course had been stalled by everything from typhoons to temples. And lingering land disputes continued to render five holes off-limits to the construction team. “We were originally going to be here a year,” the shaper said. “That was a while ago.”

He chuckled, however, as he was complaining. There were worse places than Hainan to while away time. Even after the island’s elevation to provincial status in 1988, the same year it had become China’s largest special economic zone, Hainan maintained its reputation as an outlaw state, where corruption was king. For years, its economy had arguably been built on smuggling, prostitution and unchecked property speculation.

As China’s middle class grew sharply over the past decade, officials on Hainan and in Beijing decided the island needed to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. Golf, they realized, would need to be part of the equation. Never mind the fact that building a golf course was technically illegal. They’d find a way around that. In 2005, Hainan Vice Governor Chen Cheng had famously said the province strived to have as many as three hundred golf courses some day, and they hoped to make golf its dao qiu, or “island ball.” Hainan was home to eighteen golf courses at the time.

But Hainan was still one of China’s poorest provinces, and it was only accessible by boat or plane. Construction delays were common on the more modern mainland. In backward Hainan, slow motion could turn into super-slow motion all too easily. That much was clear to the project manager on the course with the broken-down bulldozer when he arrived in the summer of 2007. An American, he had never heard of Hainan before landing the job, his first in China. “I thought I was going to hit the ground running,” he said, laughing at his naivety. Instead, he found himself sitting in an office trying to finalize contract details with potential subcontractors.

The Chinese are famous for haggling, and the process dragged on for nearly five months. That was nothing compared to the year-and-a-half he had to wait for a proper piece of equipment for his head shaper. He finally tracked down the right kind of bulldozer in Hong Kong, but for the first two months it was broken down more than it ran. Breakdowns required a repairman to travel from a dealer more than two hours away to fix the machine with “bubble gum and baling wire” until the proper parts arrived from Japan. “I stopped trying to have a schedule on everything a long time ago,” the project manager said. “I have done so many schedules for this golf course. In China, unless you have the Beijing Olympics or the World Expo coming up, a schedule doesn’t mean shit.”

While specialized equipment might have been hard to come by, laborers were not. A small army of more than three hundred workers, mostly women, were recruited, earning around forty yuan a day to help build the course and perform many tasks a machine would typically take care of, by hand. The extra manpower, no matter how motivated, did not speed things up by much. “I think out of our entire team,” the project manager said, “five, maybe ten, of them have even seen golf on TV. So they just don’t understand a lot of it.”

Most frustrating to the project manager were the complications over the land, the ones far beyond his control. In this way, Hainan was no different than any other rural area of China where officials were embracing development. More than half of the country’s 1.4 billion people live in rural areas, and relocating villages had become commonplace. In the last few years, 1.3 million people had been moved in Hubei province alone to make room for the world’s largest dam at the Three Gorges site on the Yangtze. Thousands of villagers had to be relocated to make room for the golf course and surrounding developments taking place on this part of Hainan. Not quite the scale of the world’s largest dam, but relocation was never a comfortable process, no matter how many people were affected.

In China, land is owned by the government, not the villagers. Developers deal with local officials, who in turn are responsible for compensating the displaced residents. On Hainan, villagers quickly became aware that the amount of money filtered down to them was nowhere near the actual value of their land. Residents of one of the coastal villages said they were paid a one-time sum of around sixty thousand yuan (nine thousand dollars) per person to move. In addition, each family was given a new home – a concrete, two-story townhouse in a specially built relocation community on the outskirts of a town, fifteen minutes from the shore by car.

Hainan is a poor province – according to official government statistics from 2012, the average rural family there earned only 7,408 yuan ($1,176) that year – and some of the coastal villagers were happy to take the offer on their land. Although the new, gridded community was a bit soulless compared to their lush and leafy former home, it represented a clear move toward modernity. There was reliable electricity, plumbing, a sewage system and better schools for the children. And the community would stay together.

“We moved because the majority moved,” said one elderly man who converted the ground floor of his home in the relocation neighborhood into a small shop. “Life back in the village was not easy. It was unclean. Fishing was hard work and the money was unpredictable. It’s a more comfortable life here, but I miss the freedom of the village. I miss the ocean.”

Most of those who made the move were skeptical about the future, however. What was going to happen when their compensation money ran out? Nothing had really changed for them, after all. They were still largely a community of uneducated fishermen and farmers. After the development was completed, they would have nowhere to fish or farm. The golf course and new hotels were expected to create thousands of jobs, and the developers held recruitment seminars in the town, where people were given a chance to interview for jobs as caddies, cleaners, landscapers and security guards. Still, most of the local people expressed doubt that such jobs would go to them. “They won’t hire dirty villagers like us,” one said.

Some villagers chose to express displeasure with their displacement the old-fashioned way – they refused to leave. For the past two years, a small contingent of stubborn souls had lived in makeshift homes on top of the rubble of their former village. They were unsatisfied with the compensation packages they had received, and argued they had never been given a voice in the process and had been removed forcibly from their homes. “Money cannot solve the problem now,” said one villager, who claimed to be holding out for either the right to stay or for a stake in the development. “If we move out, the place will never be ours again. Our ancestors left us this piece of land. It can’t just be taken like this. If they had properly compensated us, fine. But the government is so unreasonable. Too greedy.”

On the construction site, the project’s timeline and budget were ballooning while the government tried to persuade the holdouts to move on. “I leave the Chinese politics to the Chinese,” a project manager said. “I try to stick to what I know, and that is building a golf course. When they say I can go work a hole, I work a hole.” When he finally got the go-ahead, obstacles remained. There was a small temple in the middle of what would become the eleventh fairway. It belonged to an elderly couple, and they started living in it, afraid that the temple would be removed before they were properly compensated. The construction team worked around the structure, and every day the project manager would smile and wave at his neighbors as he drove past in his utility vehicle. It wasn’t long before the couple invited him into the temple for dinner.

The job site was also home to hundreds of graves, some centuries old. Mounds of earth occasionally marked by a modest engraved stone, each required careful relocation. Villagers received compensation for each grave removed, and negotiations over the payout for a single tomb had held up work on a hole for half a year. The project manager had picked up only a few words of Chinese, but one of them was fenmu, the word for “grave.” He had also learned jiade, the word for “fake.” Because money was involved, some villagers saw this as one of the few chances to get extra cash for their land. Phony graves frequently appeared overnight.

Entire villages, too, had been known to pop up, as opportunistic squatters tried to earn displacement packages. Some cunning villagers tried to double-dip. They’d receive compensation to leave their village one day, and the next day establish residency in another village that had yet to be relocated.

On another project in southern Hainan, aggrieved villagers built cinderblock structures hurriedly along the dirt road leading to the construction site. It was a desperate attempt to claim larger relocation settlements from the local government – since the more property you own, the larger your payout. When the money didn’t arrive, they took to blocking the access road. The protests, usually peaceful, shut down construction for three weeks. Such delays were nothing new to this project; various land issues had caused several stoppages since work began.

“We would come to work for a week and then they would shut it down for a week and then we’d work for a week,” explained that project manager, who said his team generally had a good relationship with the villagers, even the ones who would occasionally form a human roadblock. “They would come over and say, ‘Hey, don’t work today.’ Nothing real hostile. Some of the other jobs I’ve known in China, it’s been pretty hostile, where it’s a safety issue.”

The project manager did recall one instance where he felt his safety was at risk. He was visiting the job site with the course architect, and they had been warned when they arrived that villagers were planning to block the access road soon. “Finish up your business and get out of here,” they were told. But when they attempted their exit, the road was already blocked.

“The first thing I see is some guy – they are usually pretty drunk – and he came running toward our truck with a big brick,” the project manager said.

The project manager and the architect quickly locked their doors and the driver, a local man, attempted to negotiate. Once the protesters learned the car’s occupants were not with the Chinese developer or the local government, tempers began to abate. “We heard them say gweilo, or foreigner, and then they started easing up,” he said. “Near the end they were apologizing. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ We said, ‘Okay, no problem. We understand.’ They just want their money. That’s the whole thing.”

Not long after, early one morning, several hundred government employees arrived at the site, armed with heavy equipment. They knocked the cinderblock houses down one by one.

“Often, as is the case in China, you just have to take a deep breath and relax,” said a Western representative for the developer of the shoreline project. “Things will happen, but in good time. You can’t force things. The country is simply run differently.”

As it happened, such differences made some aspects of building a golf course easier in China. In the United States, anyone trying to develop on a shoreline would have to jump through a series of complex and time-consuming regulatory hoops, from city to county to state to federal, in an effort to receive proper approvals. There would be issues to negotiate with coastal commissions, community groups and environmental organizations. Most developers agree that it would be almost impossible to build another Pebble Beach in the United States nowadays. But in Hainan? “There are no official environmental challenges here at all,” said the developer’s representative, noting that rather strict land planning laws exist in China, but are enforced haphazardly. “I don’t think China has reached that stage just yet. It’s up to the owner if you want to be responsible or not.”

That’s a scary prospect anywhere in the world, but in this case the developers were determined to do things right. They brought in an environmentally-minded firm to do the master planning, and their initial surveys confirmed what the project manager observed upon arrival: “There was no ecosystem here. Everything was raped and pillaged.”

Several decades of development have taken their toll on Hainan’s ecology. Some sixty years ago, the major culprit was the conversion of ancient woodlands into “commercial forests,” used to produce rubber, timber and, more recently, paper. These had a huge effect on Hainan’s biodiversity. Many native plant and animal species came under severe threat, most notably the Hainan gibbon, which today is the most endangered ape in the world according to the Zoological Society of London. In the 1950s, there were about two thousand Hainan gibbons on the island; now, there are between twenty-three and twenty-five, all in the Bawangling Nature Reserve, in western Hainan, established in 1980. Logging was banned in Hainan’s natural forests in the 1990s, but enforcement of the law has been erratic. Greed, lack of manpower and oversight get in the way. In more recent decades, hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest and natural habitat have been lost thanks to the out-of-control real estate market and the slash-and-burn farming techniques of local villagers.

Environmentalists would likely applaud the efforts this golf course has made to clean up nearby waterways heavily polluted by human waste and scores of tiny fish farms, and restore ecological diversity to the land – the sandy soil had been rendered nearly lifeless after many years of water-intensive watermelon farming. The designers and the construction team were also intent on building a course as natural-looking as possible. They set large areas aside for landscaping, and planted only species native to the island. They created wetlands and reintroduced mangrove forests. Birdlife began to return to the area. Seashore paspalum grass was planted because of its ability to tolerate saltwater and gray water. Fairway runoff was designed to flow back into the course’s irrigation ponds and, once the hotels and residences were completed, effluent would be treated and then used as an irrigator, as well. “It’s all going to be worth it,” the shaper said. “And, actually, I’ve really learned to like it here. I think we are going to look back at this in five years and say, ‘God, too bad it didn’t go on another year or two.’”

But for now, no one was allowed to talk about it – on the record, at least. The politics were just too complicated.

*

By late 2008, Wang Libo’s new home was almost completed. It was a colossal structure, right on the edge of the cement road, where it couldn’t be missed. From the outside, it resembled a fancy jail, with shiny metal bars covering the house’s square windows of blue, reflective glass, the kind you might see on one of the brand-new high-rises on the mainland, in Shenzhen or Chongqing. The brick and cement walls of Wang’s house were covered in a glossy tan tile. All the lines were clean. Everything was symmetrical. At ground level there were two massive metal front doors, square, just like the windows. They probably measured twelve feet by twelve feet and opened onto a cavernous ground level, with fifteen-foot-tall ceilings and a bare cement floor. It was Wang’s garage, and it was large enough to fit dozens of san lun che, the type of three-wheeled truck he used for his livelihood. The living quarters on the second floor were basic and spare and totally devoid of character. But the walls were flat and smooth, the floors covered with cold tile. For Meiqiu, it felt like a mansion.

Not ten feet from the back door was the cement home Wang and his wife had built in 2000. It looked ancient by comparison, and was dwarfed by its new neighbor. From the new house’s flat roof, Wang could look out and see a timeline of his life. Off in the distance, what to most looked like wild forest, Wang knew to be Cangdao, the now overgrown remains of the village his ancestors had fled at the time of the Japanese invasion in the Second World War. Wang’s eyes traced the path his terrified grandparents must have followed to Meiqiu. There, he spotted the phoenix tree and, not far from it, the tile top of his parents’ lava stone abode, where he had grown up. Nearby, the lychee trees he had once climbed for both work and play.

To see his most recent history, all Wang had to do was look down. There before him was his first modest cement home, the first place of his own, which just eight years earlier had represented a major leap from old village ways. On the opposite side of his new home, parked next to the cement road, Wang could see his san lun che, which provided his new steady source of income not reliant on harvest seasons or the whims of Mother Nature.

On a clear day, Wang could gaze far beyond the cement road and see hints of the Haikou skyline, which had grown in ways his grandfather would have thought unimaginable. In recent months, Wang’s view of the city had been partially occluded by a haze of red dust emanating from Project 791, the massive construction site nearby – but that construction site was the only reason Wang could enjoy this lofty perch in the first place.

These days, Wang was looking younger than his thirty-seven years, with his baby face, full lips, big eyes and black hair kept in a crew cut. The worries of the past seemed to no longer play across his brow. Perhaps that was because Wang had been one of the first villagers to sell his land. In the end, he had sold nine mu, which netted him around 180,000 yuan, most of which went directly into his new house. Initially, he had, like the others, considered trying to fight the sale of land that featured some of his most prized fruit trees, or trying to negotiate a higher price. But then he considered the parties involved – a powerful Hong Kong developer, an unscrupulous local government, and a poor villager with a three-wheeled truck – and quickly determined his case was hopeless. People are offering you money for your land, he thought. More money than you ever thought anyone would pay for your land. Take the money while it’s still there.

The people of Yangshan district, the volcanic expanse of which Meiqiu was a part, had always felt a special connection to their land. There was a pride of ownership, even though “ownership” hadn’t been the appropriate word for decades. The government owns all land in China; the villagers just lease it. Still, many area residents felt they were closer to being landowners than most rural Chinese. “The land in Yangshan is different,” Wang said. “It was passed down to us by our ancestors, so you get whatever your parents gave you. And if your grandparents or parents had money, they could buy more land and you get more. It’s not like collectively owned rice fields or other farmland. Our land is individually owned.”

So, whereas in other parts of rural China, the proceeds from a large land sale would be split up evenly among the villagers, in Meiqiu there were definite haves and have-nots. It all depended on how forward-thinking a person’s forebears had been, and where the Red Line happened to fall.

Tucked somewhere safe in every village household was a bundle of old documents, tattered, stained and brown with age. These papers, some more than half a century old, told the story of the land, of Meiqiu and, in some ways, of China. They had the look and feel of old treasure maps, and in some cases had indeed led their owners to previously unimaginable riches. But the bounty came with an uncertain future.

Typically, the oldest document in the bundle was in traditional characters, and read top to bottom and right to left. Titled “Land and Real Estate Ownership Certificate” and dated July 1953, four years after Mao and the Communists came to power, it stated in no uncertain terms that the parties named on the certificate were the sole private owners of the land, and that their rights of ownership cannot be infringed. This was thanks to the Land Reform Law, a mass experiment that took land from feudal landlords and gave it back to the peasants. The law had been formally adopted three years earlier, in 1950. Everything took a little bit longer to reach Hainan.

The documents themselves were beautiful, with carefully handwritten characters in black ink and a square chop, or seal, and an ornate calligraphic signature in red to make it all official. Most would say these relics were of little legal value, and might be better off displayed in some kind of museum, but the villagers clung to the papers because they represented the only written proof to their claims. For each parcel of land, the certificate listed the county, the type of land and how many mu were included. Then it identified what’s known as the “four to’s,” which took the place of latitude and longitude in specifying the boundaries of the property. For example, one section might read: “East to Shengshu; South to Meixiao; West to Laiji; North to Guoshi.” Not exactly scientific, so people built walls, and those lava rock partitions had largely stood the test of time.

The walls remained, even as private ownership soon gave way to collective farming and people’s communes in 1958. The walls survived the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and when Deng Xiaoping instituted the Household Responsibility System (HRS) in 1978 as part of his “opening up” reforms, the walls were still there, as well. The HRS marked an end to collective agriculture in rural China, and ushered in a new era of land-use rights, although not ownership, for individual families. And when that happened, the walls helped villagers in Meiqiu go back to using the land that was legally theirs a quarter of a century earlier.

Yet, every paper issued after 1953 also made it plain that the government owned the land and the villagers were simply leasing it, usually for a period of fifty years. One paper said the lessee must give 3.25 yuan to the village and fifty-four kilograms of grain to the nation each year for the right to use the land.

*

Not everyone in Meiqiu had been as lucky as Wang Libo, who had taken advantage of his bundle of documents to seal a deal with local government officials for the family acreage inside the Red Line. Many people had not yet received any payout, and without that they couldn’t build new houses or contemplate the next phase of their lives. In fact, there was two hundred mu of contested land still to be settled, and for several villagers, proving they were among the rightful owners of that land was their last chance to cash in on Project 791.

There were three unique claims to the disputed land. Some argued that it was in fact collectively owned, that it hadn’t been used until the village reclaimed it at the launch of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958. They said the profits from this land should be evenly distributed between the families who were able to present a Meiqiu hukou, the official household registration certificate. There was also a small group of Meiqiu villagers, ancestors of residents of Cangdao – the nearby village that had been ransacked by the Japanese during the Second World War – who said a large chunk of this acreage was privately owned, and they had the tattered paperwork to prove it. And finally, there was Wang Puhua, a Meiqiu resident born in 1950 who was a vocal supporter of the group arguing that the land was collectively owned. He also had a distinct assertion of his own: surrounded by the village’s land were three mu owned by him, and him only.

“My family rented this land before 1958, and I have rented this land since the new land reform in 1978,” Wang Puhua said. “If I say this land doesn’t belong to me, who else does it belong to? I still have the certificate for this three mu of land.”

There was a rub, however. Mission Hills had already paid someone for the land. Naturally, Mission Hills was arguing that they could do what they wanted with the property; contracts had been signed, money had traded hands and the land was rightfully theirs. But who had the money? Wang Puhua knew he didn’t.

The developers had given money to local government officials expecting the cash would reach the proper parties. Everyone, including the villagers, was in agreement about this one fact – it was how things were done in China. But money for more than half of the contested land was unaccounted for. Some thought the Yongxing town government had the money. Some thought Xiuying district government had it. Others thought neighboring Longhua district had it, since it too was claiming ownership of part of the land. How could this happen? One villager summed it up bluntly: “Our government is disorganized.”

The money for the other part of the land in question, some ninety to one hundred mu, had been tracked down. It had been paid to the Cangdao ancestors, of whom Wang Libo was one. Wang had never really identified as being from Cangdao. He was born in Meiqiu. He lived his whole life in Meiqiu. Almost all of his friends were from Meiqiu. In 1999, his fellow villagers even nominated him to be Meiqiu’s governor (an honor he declined). But now he was labeled an outsider, because two groups of people claimed ownership over a rocky and weedy plot of land that no one really cared about until a year earlier, and some of them had been left empty-handed.

Wang Libo believed the contested land belonged to about ten individual farmers, all of whom happened to have ancestors from Cangdao. He said the old documents supported this claim, and that it was those ten farmers who had tended fruit trees on the land over the past several decades. Wang Puhua and others in Meiqiu – many who had yet to see any financial gains from Project 791 – disagreed.

The dispute built another wall, a figurative one, that cut right down the middle of a once tight-knit community. “Wang Libo is divided from us – and he has good guanxi with the government,” Wang Puhua said, noting that Wang Libo’s cousin, Wang Liguo, was a local government official who lived in a nearby town. “He no longer belongs to Meiqiu,” Wang Puhua went on. “If the village has a meeting, he says he has no time to attend. If something good happens to him, he won’t invite the rest of us to celebrate together. You see, almost all the new cement houses along the cement road are owned by old Cangdao villagers. They sold a lot of land and have enough money to build these big new houses.”

Wang Libo didn’t feel comfortable discussing the conflict, but he did admit he had stopped going to village meetings because he no longer felt welcome there. “Some villagers act very cold toward me,” he said. “Especially some stubborn old men. They never say a word to me anymore.”

All this bickering over land and money was somewhat ironic. The residents of Meiqiu had never had money to fight over before, and they never thought anyone would have any interest in their land. The soil was too rocky. They weren’t near the water. And this was Hainan – isolated, remote, backward and an afterthought for most mainlanders. Why would anyone want to buy land in this place, where life was so hard?

In the past, if land exchanged hands it was typically from villager to villager. For example, the land Wang Libo had built his new home on was purchased by his father in the 1990s. But, up until the mid-1990s, prices remained quite low. Huangdi, or “wasteland,” could be snatched up for three thousand yuan per mu. For land with fruit trees, you’d be doing quite well if you could attract ten thousand yuan per mu, about a third of what villagers received when Mission Hills came to town.

“We never expected such a big company to come and develop our lands,” he said.

The former residents of Meiqiu were also split in their opinions about the big company that had arrived on their doorsteps. Their thinking largely depended on one thing, of course: whether the big company had paid for their land or not.

“The development is of no use to us at all,” said Wang Puhua. “They took our lands without paying us. How can I say something good about them?”

His daughter-in-law felt the same way. Having Project 791 next door – even if it was destined to be the world’s biggest collection of golf courses – was not going to change the quality of her life. “If we just continued to farm the fruit trees and reap the lychee, I think life is still okay,” she said. “If we don’t farm lands, and do something else, I think it would still be the same. We just have to change our way of making a living. That’s all.”

Wang Boming, who managed to sell just one mu of land to Mission Hills, argued that the development was not going to be the job creator some were suggesting. “They said they would offer jobs for us villagers, but what they really gave us is only the lowest-paid and toughest jobs, like cleaners, lawn mowers, or caddies,” he said. “The management jobs are always taken away by the outsiders from other provinces.”

A driver from the area – also named Wang, naturally – felt this way of thinking was shortsighted. “The local people are not well educated,” he said. “Why should they be put in administrative positions? We have lots of local graduates from Hainan University working for 791. It has nothing to do with discrimination against the locals, what really matters is the education issue. Some local women, they can’t read or speak Mandarin, how can we make them do something else beside cleaning?”

He also didn’t think villagers should eschew the salaries that Mission Hills was offering – eight hundred to nine hundred yuan a month. “The company pays the insurance and pension,” he continued. “If they keep working for fifteen years, they can retire. They need to think long-term. If we add all of this together, their salary can exceed one thousand yuan per month.

“For me, however, I won’t do these jobs. I would prefer to buy my own car and drive customers. These jobs are especially good for the illiterate women. In the long run, I am sure this place will become better and better. In the short term, people will feel pity for having lost their land. But we need to look beyond the present day.”

Wang Libo, who at first was skeptical about Project 791, was also beginning to adopt a long view of the situation. Perhaps it was easier for him to do so, from the comfort of his new home near the cement road. “In the long run, the development will bring more opportunities to the farmers,” he said, “because many areas of wasteland on this island haven’t been used for hundreds of years. Now they are being developed, and farmers will receive compensation. Before 791 came, there was no development project, and no chance to make money. Now they have come, and we have good chance to do business. It’s better now.”

And it was business Wang had on his mind, now that it was spring.

There was yet another small protest taking place adjacent to his walled-off lot, just beyond the border of Mission Hills, but Wang was not interested in the demonstration today. He had seen many of those before. Instead, he focused his attention on the construction taking place on the other side of his brick wall. Buildings were going up fast, and they were huge. Wang knew he’d have to go all the way to Haikou to see anything of a similar size.

“Hey! Friend!” Wang yelled to a shirtless worker wearing an orange hard hat, his skin glistening with sweat and as dark as Wang’s used to get when he labored as a brick layer. “What is this place?”

“Workers’ dormitory,” the young man replied. “Ten thousand people will live here when we’re done.”

Wang’s heart began to race. “Thanks!” he yelled back and hurriedly got back into his three-wheeled truck. He didn’t know exactly why he was so excited, but he couldn’t wait to tell his wife the news.

*

Rumors about a Mission Hills project in Hainan had begun to spread among those working in the China golf industry early in 2008. Details were fuzzy, but it was an open secret that the Chu family was up to something on the island, and that it was big – the family didn’t know how to do anything small. By April, twelve seemed to be the number most people were whispering. And by that they meant twelve courses.

Then, in August, Golf Digest magazine published a series of stories about golf in China, set to coincide with the launch of the Beijing Olympics. In one piece, entitled “Golf in the Year of the Rat,” reporter John Barton wrote about some of China’s more mind-bogglingly massive golf construction projects – double-digit course layouts, once unheard of, now seemed normal in the country. Barton added, “But even that will be dwarfed by Mission Hills’ grand ambitions in Hainan Island, off China’s southern coast, where the hope is to build up to 36 golf courses as part of a master plan to turn the island into Asia’s Myrtle Beach.”

In September, American irrigation systems manufacturer Lindsay Corporation included a boast in the company newsletter:

Five Watertronics pump stations recently arrived in China. Part of the Mission Hills Hainan project, the pump stations will be used on Hainan Island, off the coast of Southern China.

Mission Hills Hainan consists of 36 18-hole golf courses being developed during a three-year period. Watertronics revenue for this project will exceed $8,000,000…

When completed, the project will be the world’s largest golfing complex, catering not only to the Asian market, but to “must play” golfing enthusiasts throughout the globe.

The same developer recently completed Mission Hills Golfing Resort Complex in Shenzhen, China, across from Hong Kong. It consists of ten eighteen-hole courses and is currently the world’s largest golf course.

Watertronics has provided pumping systems worth more than $1 million.

There was no more conspicuous a golf project on the planet, but Ken Chu still insisted all those involved treated it as “top secret.” The Chinese have a saying about unwanted attention: “Man should fear fame like pigs fear getting fat.” No developer wanted their golf course to become the fat pig – the project that drew the eye, and the ire, of Beijing – and was put up for slaughter. One member of the design team tried to explain this “if you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist” mentality. “They don’t want to create any more stir,” he said. “The last thing they want is Beijing saying, ‘What are you doing, building this many golf courses down here?’ It’s like, ‘You might already know, but I’m never going to tell you.’ That’s what they have to do. That’s the game in China.”

As Ken stepped more to the fore, his father, David, became increasingly reclusive. According to Martin, it was hard to “get anywhere near that guy,” though he was managing the construction of fifteen courses for the family business. Even back in 2002 and 2003, when Martin was building the five Mission Hills courses in Shenzhen, right in the eldest Chu’s backyard, it was always an adventure going to see him. Usually, Ken would summon Martin for an audience. “My father would like to talk to you,” he’d say, and what would follow would be like something out of a James Bond film. David’s office was hidden in a high-security compound, protected by a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints. Martin recalled being escorted through “dungeon doors” that weighed “about ten thousand pounds each.” Then he’d be asked to wait in a holding room until the patriarch was ready to see him. During the Haikou job, Martin saw and shook hands with David just once.

There were stories about David Chu using an elaborate series of decoys and car switches before boarding flights out of Hong Kong. No one knew whether these stories were accurate, of course, but such tales and others like them flourished, adding to the mystique surrounding the family. Call it extreme caution, or call it paranoia, some of it seemed to have been passed down to Ken. Like father, like son.

Mission Hills was now renowned for its formidable security staff – hundreds of highly trained young men, each a physical specimen, the equivalent of a small army. Early each morning you could hear them running through a workout regimen and tackling obstacle courses. A few times each year, at staff parties, the security team would wow the crowd with demonstrations of combat techniques and gymnastics that were at once thrilling and intimidating. The Mission Hills security detail was also famous for its canine contingent, a hundred or so police-trained purebred German Shepherd dogs imported from the United States. “When they say ‘attack,’ they attack,” Martin said. “My staff used to complain that those dogs lived better than they did.”

Workers at the Mission Hills project in Hainan said Ken would fly down to visit the site twice a month. His visits would rarely last more than a day, but always made an impression. He would be driven around the complex in a black car with tinted windows, a sizable entourage in tow. The full motorcade typically counted four cars flanked at each corner by a security guard on a motorbike. “It was like you’d see for the president of the United States,” one observer said. At tournaments, Ken would be surrounded by a “fleet of golf buggies” – anywhere from six to twelve carts carrying a variety of security, public relations and other random personnel – tasked with following his every move. “It was excessive, kind of comical, actually,” one worker recalled, saying the commotion was all part of “the image.” This Mission Hills insider also felt the Chus’ “unnecessary secrecy” and the over-the-top security helped to stew impressions that “maybe there is more that we don’t know.”

The worker wasn’t alone. A journalist working on a routine story about the Chu family was delayed for months because Mission Hills went silent during the fact-checking process, stalling on basic details regarding the company’s timeline, even the birth dates of key figures. “It was insane,” the reporter said. “It was just a mystery what happened. They just wouldn’t talk about anything.” The impression the reporter was left with, valid or not, was that Mission Hills had something to hide, thus casting a shadow on the rest of the company’s story, much of which seemed positive and a true embodiment of the Chinese Dream. “They really bring it on themselves,” the journalist said. “There’s a difference between secretive and cautious. Acting like everything is so secret is just a mistake.”

Some secrets are harder to keep than others, especially if they occupy thirty-nine square miles of land – just shy of 25,000 acres. That was the size of the original Hainan plot Mission Hills was attached to, when David Chu settled on thirty-six courses, seemingly at random, according to those who worked on the project from the beginning. “Good feng shui, I don’t know,” offered one baffled member of the design team. “And they were looking to get more land. Basically it was, ‘How much can you give me?’”

And Mission Hills was not alone. All sorts of conglomerates, both state-owned and private, including the China Poly Group and Hainan Airlines Group, were bolstering their real estate portfolios, snatching up large patches of land left and right, with a special focus on Hainan. “It’s all about the land grab right now,” acknowledged one golf design professional.

It would be difficult for local government officials to feign ignorance of the world’s largest golf construction project happening on their island. In addition to negotiating the land purchases from the villages, Hainan government had a monopoly on the sale of sand on the island, and golf courses use a lot of sand. “You ain’t getting it unless you go through the government,” Martin explained. “They’ve claimed all rights to it. If you’re going to pull your truck down there and set up operations and pull out of there, the government’s going to be involved.”

The master plan for Mission Hills Haikou called for twenty-two courses on the northern part of the property, close to the airport, and fourteen down south. But from early on, it was clear some courses were a higher priority than others. The original plan to start all of the courses simultaneously evaporated, and Martin’s crew was told to focus on the northern tract while Chinese laborers toiled in the south.

Before long, some of the planned courses quietly evaporated, too. Twenty-two, not thirty-six, became the number the crew discussed internally. Dust-ups over land put the entire southern part of the project on hold, even though irrigation was laid for a number of courses there, and parts of two courses were completely grassed. Workers were told to let those two courses grow over.

That a project originally intended to cover such a huge acreage encountered problems related to land disputes surprised hardly anyone. It made sense that a monster undertaking like Mission Hills Haikou, at roughly fifty times the size of the average residential golf course project, had at least fifty times the amount of border disputes. Workers said protesters appeared on the construction site “countless times.”

“They always come out with their machetes,” one American staffer said. “There’ll be thirty little women and they’ll all start screaming Hainanese and shaking their machetes and yelling at you. It’s always about money. It’s always about getting paid. They’re never violent. They never do anything. They know that that would just be tragic. They’d probably get shot or something. But anytime that happens, we’ll just leave that area.”

The worker said it was shocking to come from the United States, where land deals are so “cut and dry,” to China, where everything is “muddled.” He said the property lines of the Mission Hills project had changed “hundreds” of times.

Sometimes boundaries changed as the result of ongoing government negotiations with the villagers, and other times due to certain pieces of land, seemingly at random, being designated farmland, and therefore off-limits for development. “They wouldn’t even let anyone farm there, and anyway it was nothing but lava rock,” Martin said, perplexed. “Just some imaginary line the government came up with.”

Mission Hills’ marquee championship course was affected by such a designation. All eighteen holes of what’s now known as the Blackstone Course were completely finished and playable, and then it was determined that parts of three holes – Nos. 16, 17 and 18 – were built on land that was suddenly considered farmland. Ken Chu negotiated with the local government for close to three months, and then one day, after talks broke down, he came to the site and told Martin’s team to completely re-route the holes to accommodate the new property line. He demanded a new design be ready by the following day.

“They were great holes, with a lake,” Martin said. “The next day we had thirty-two excavators in there completely ripping it all up, irrigation and everything.”

A group of high-level local government officials came out that day, as well. They urged the workers to stop, saying they were so close to striking a deal. But Ken wasn’t interested in waiting any longer. And he didn’t want to make a deal now only to have it blow up on him in a year or two. That was smart. Farmland – or at least land that was being called “farmland” by the government on this particular day – was off-limits, and he didn’t want any part of it.

“We ripped up many, many courses,” Martin said. He estimates they built two entire courses’ worth of extra holes just trying to keep up with the property’s protean borders. “This new farmland concept is definitely coming into play,” Martin said. “Every time a new plan comes out with new farmland boundaries, we’re moving holes left and right.”

Other alterations had nothing to do with villagers or government officials. They were more about knowing your audience. One of the courses at Mission Hills Haikou was inspired by the classic American courses of the early 1900s, known by some as the “golden age” of golf course design. An architectural feature common during that era was artificial mounds of earth, often many of them, known as “chocolate drops.” Designer Brian Curley had positioned several of these chocolate drops throughout the vintage course, and when Ken Chu first laid eyes on the mounds he loved them, and ordered more. For the next three months, Martin’s team added “loads of dirt” to the fairways, adorning the course with the humps and bumps their boss had requested.

One month after the course started receiving visitors, Ken updated his request.

“Take every one of those mounds out,” he ordered. “Take them all out!”

Apparently, 90 percent of the Chinese who saw the course thought the mounds looked like graves.

But the delays and dust-ups were mere sideshows to the main event – the largest golf course construction project in history.

“The Mission Hills one on Hainan still kind of amazes me – boggles my mind,” said a project manager for a different course under construction on the island. “The scope of the project is larger than the city of Haikou. One guy I know who lives there at the complex has to drive an hour and a half just to get to the part of the site where he works.”

By the spring of 2009 there were a dozen golf courses under construction simultaneously. There were more than five hundred pieces of heavy machinery on site. From a distance, it looked a bit like Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs roaming the earth, it was giant excavators and rock hammers. And because the entire complex was being built on thick volcanic rock, drilling rigs and dynamite teams were always on call. “This much equipment on a golf site is not normal – not remotely normal,” one American worker said, noting that a typical eighteen-hole project would have about 1 percent the amount of machinery. To keep up with the demands of construction, the Chus built their own concrete factory on site, with fifteen cement mixing trucks working exclusively for them.

More than 350 million cubic feet of topsoil, enough to fill London’s Wembley Stadium nine times, was brought in from an offsite location by a caravan of more than six hundred dump trucks running twenty hours a day. “They bought a mountain… and they basically cut it thirty meters down and turned it into a lake,” an American worker at the site said.

While certain species of trees and shrubs thrived on the volcanic landscape, the rocky earth was not suitable for most forms of farming, nor was it suitable for building and shaping golf courses, which require a couple meters of moldable topsoil. Mission Hills bought a mountain, a small one about five miles from the construction site, and started digging – until the mountain was a hole in the ground. Those six hundred dump trucks ping-ponged between the two sites, transporting the mountain’s red earth to the construction site, where it was stored in a huge flat pile that looked like an Arizona plateau.