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China cracks down on ‘sport for millionaires’

HONG KONG — President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on vice and corruption in China has gone after drugs, gambling, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and overflowing banquet tables. Now it has turned to a less obvious target: Golf.

In Guangdong, home to the world’s largest golf facility, the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club, party officials have been forbidden to play during work hours ‘to prevent unclean behaviour and disciplinary or illegal conduct’. Photo: Bloomberg

In Guangdong, home to the world’s largest golf facility, the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club, party officials have been forbidden to play during work hours ‘to prevent unclean behaviour and disciplinary or illegal conduct’. Photo: Bloomberg

HONG KONG — President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on vice and corruption in China has gone after drugs, gambling, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and overflowing banquet tables. Now it has turned to a less obvious target: Golf.

In a flurry of recent reports, state-run news outlets have depicted the sport as yet another temptation that has led Communist Party officials astray. A top official at the Commerce Ministry is under investigation on suspicion of allowing an unidentified company to pay his golf expenses. The government has shut down dozens of courses across the country built in violation of a ban intended to protect China’s limited supplies of water and arable land.

And in Guangdong, home to the world’s largest golf facility, the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club, party officials have been forbidden to play during work hours “to prevent unclean behaviour and disciplinary or illegal conduct”.

The provincial anti-corruption agency has set up a hotline for reporting civil servants who violate nine specific regulations, including prohibitions on betting on golf, playing with people connected to one’s job, travelling on golf-related junkets or holding positions on the boards of golf clubs.

“Like fine liquor and tobacco, fancy cars and mansions, golf is a public relations tool that businessmen use to hook officials,” the newspaper of the party’s anti-graft agency declared on April 9. “The golf course is gradually changing into a muddy field where they trade money for power.”

Mr Dan Washburn, author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, said the crackdown was not surprising given the game’s reputation in China as a capitalist pastime and the extent of Mr Xi’s prolonged campaign against corruption, which has toppled senior party and military leaders.

“Everyone’s a potential target in this ongoing crackdown on corruption, and golf is a particularly easy and obvious one,” Mr Washburn said.

Golf has faced harsh suppression in China before. When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong condemned the game as a “sport for millionaires”, and courses were turned into public parks, zoos and communal farms.

The sport went dormant for three decades before China’s first course since the revolution opened in 1984. Now, as many as one million people play the game in China. Though it is popular among members of the wealthy elite — including party bureaucrats, apparently — some of China’s earliest professional golfers are former workers and farmers who stumbled onto the game.

Mr Huang Wenyi, a construction worker who is now the world’s 1,189th-ranked player, thrilled Chinese fans on Thursday after he led at the end of the first day of the Shenzhen International, a European Tour-sanctioned event.

Chinese players in their teens or younger, drilled by parents and coaches with a resolution that rivals that of state-run sports schools, are expected to be strongly represented among the world’s top players in coming decades.

The national government banned the construction of new courses in 2004, citing concern over the environmental impact of unrestrained development. But the number of courses in China has grown more than three-fold to 600 since then, according to industry estimates.

Courses were often built as part of luxury housing developments to increase land value and attract rich property investors. Local governments, which depend on land sales for a large share of their revenues, looked the other way as developers described them as “leisure” facilities.

After years of warnings, the National Development and Reform Commission said on March 30 that 66 illegally constructed golf courses in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and 20 provinces had been closed — and indicated that its investigation was continuing.

The next day, anti-corruption investigators at the Ministry of Commerce announced that they were investigating Wang Shenyang, director-general of the ministry’s Department of Outward Investment and Economic Cooperation, on suspicion of participating in golf sponsored by an unidentified company.

The Ministry of Justice’s Legal Weekly also published a list of 15 party officials who have been punished in the last decade for golf-related transgressions. It included Sun Guoqing, head of the Ministry of Transportation’s planning department, who was suspected of using public funds to pay for rounds, and Han Jiang, a Shenzhen district official, who was convicted of receiving nearly US$1 million (S$1.3 million) in bribes, the largest single portion of which was a Mission Hills Golf Club membership.

“Golf, because of its high cost and unique glamour, has been called the ‘aristocrats’ game,” the newspaper said. “But an awkward truth is that because of ‘rotten’ golf, some officials have been punished or even jailed.”

Mr Washburn said golf would continue to be buffeted by the contradictions of a country that has embraced market forces as it continues to describe itself as socialist.

“There are alternate realities in China,” he said. “One day you’ll read headlines about a war on golf, and the next you’ll hear about China’s future Olympic golf stars.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

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