Golf symbolises western sophistication in China, which will soon boast the world's largest course. But land and water shortages could spoil the play, writes Mark Godfrey
The billboards at the entrance to Guomao underground station, in Beijing's business district, read "Golf Wonderland for Germany Life", handily if not quite fluently synopsising a vision of sophistication as seen by the urbanites who staff the local offices. Live amid the pine trees of a local "Black Forest", minutes from a golf course, and you've made it, the thinking goes.
Fifteen minutes' walk south leads one to the site of this real-estate idyll. There are no green trees in sight, only a construction site wedged amid clusters of high-rise office buildings. This is known as Central Business District, so there's no room for any golf course. No matter, explains the staff in the sales office. They'll build a driving range and plant some trees to make it look like Germany. The "golf course view" mentioned in the billboard is actually a view of a driving range.
Chinese property developers are increasingly using golf to lend a tone of western sophistication to their properties. The game has become immensely popular in the past few years, after being frowned on for more than half a century.
China's last emperor, Pu Yi, learned the game from his English tutor in the 1920s, but poverty, war and Mao Zedong's ideological foreboding kept the game at arm's length for decades, until the 1980s, when state planners directed by Deng Xiaoping, Mao's free-market successor, began to see the game as a chance to attract foreign investment. The first course built in post-revolution China was designed by the golfing icon Arnold Palmer and opened in Guangdong province in 1984.
More than €4.5 billion has been spent on China's courses since then, according to the Golf Research Group, an international consultancy, making the country the world's fifth-largest golfing nation in terms of green space.
China's young middle-class professionals are climbing the social ladder and seeking signs of social status. They've caught on to coffee, horse riding, cocktails and, now, golf. In a land where GDP barely reaches €1,000 a person - the Republic's was €33,000 in 2002 - it's an expensive path to better guanxi, or connections, however. Green fees at Beijing Golf & Country Club, in Shunyi County, hit 1,200 yuan (€119) at weekends. The prestigious Shanghai Silport Club charges 60,000 yuan (€5,950) for full membership. Most of the club's 700-plus members are expatriates or tourists, however.
"Golf is a very popular sport in America, and most professionals can afford it there, but in China, like in Japan and Korea, the price of playing is extremely high. It is just for elites," says Zhang Shidong, a consultant at the Beijing office of Mercer, an international recruitment company.
To dodge high green fees locals practise their shots at driving ranges, of which the main cities have many. Dongjin Golf Club, in Beijing's upmarket Chaoyang district, is hardly a club in the conventional sense. Rather it's a ragged driving range thrown up on a site that's been cleared but untouched for two years. For 50 yuan (€4.95) golfers can hit an unlimited number of balls for an hour, hitting from a shed formed by the facade and concrete floor of a house that once stood here. Sheets of polythene make up the roof.
Until recently golf was the preserve of China's business elite. Today young Chinese returning home from abroad with qualifications and training have taken up the game, creating a new market of educated and ambitious office workers who see the game as an opportunity to network and mix with foreign peers.
The absence of public courses will probably keep the game an elitist sport. Golf has provided a healthy source of tax income for a nonchalant politburo: course developments are taxed at 23 per cent. The tax is partly meant as a means to control overdevelopment in the sector, but it has hardly succeeded. Almost half the country's 200 golf courses are in Guangdong, bordering Hong Kong. Others have been abandoned or are not in use because of bankrupted real-estate projects, common in China. Course-side villas sell very well in Beijing and Shanghai, however.
There's money to be made off the course also. China is the world's leading exporter of golf equipment, shipping €700 million worth of gear in 2003, according to the Golf Research Group. But there are also plenty of counterfeit Spalding irons and Callaway golf balls for sale in China, at a fraction of the prices on the tags attached to legitimate goods.
The sportswear makers Nike and Adidas already have large local manufacturing bases; now they are also strengthening their marketing presence. The world's golf-industry chiefs will gather in Beijing in June for the PGA Show Asia, a "trade summit and expo" organised by the Asian wing of the Professional Golfers' Association.
The "Asia Tiger", Zhang Lianwei, is China's number one golfer, with wins on the PGA's Canadian, Asian and European tours. Having won his country's most lucrative competition, the Volvo China Open, last year, he's now targeting Japan, Asia's most lucrative golfing circuit.
Zhang joined Yeh Wei-tze of Taiwan and Derek Fung of Hong Kong to take on Woods in the BBK Tiger Woods Mission Hills Challenge in November 2001. The game was staged at Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen, a huge industrial city rubbing up against Hong Kong. Woods won the contest, an enormous media event in China, drawing local businessmen who paid €130,000 each to play a hole with Woods. Part of a broader real-estate project, Mission Hills is the only golf club in China recognised by the US PGA. It's also set to become the world's largest course when the 180th hole is added to the massive complex later this year.
On his visit to Mission Hills Woods launched the local branch of the First Tee, a programme that seeks to improve the affordability and accessibility of golf. The initiative has its work cut out in China, where only a small percentage of the population will ever have the means to pay green fees or buy golf equipment.
"Before the reform period golf was not very favourably viewed by Chinese society. It was seen as too elitist and a rich man's game," says Yang Guangping, five-time winner of the Helong Cup, China's premier amateur tournament. "Now China's economic development is spurring a new interest in this sport, and I believe in 10 years' time Chinese golf will be able to match the rest of the world," says the 64-year-old, who turned a late conversion to the sport into a business. He owns a driving range and a golf equipment store in Beijing.
The biggest obstacles to the continued growth of golf in China are land and water, both in short supply in Beijing and the industrialised north. The capital is facing a serious water shortage, the city's unrelenting expansion having drained rivers and forced municipal chiefs to divert water from other provinces.
Just north of the Beijing Riviera luxury villa complex, north-east of the city, a golf course has been in planning for two years. Brown and grey, the course is pockmarked by clumps of trees. Plastic bags and rubbish float over the railings from a nearby village, where locals live in cramped and grubby housing. The smell from a canal carrying raw sewage there permeates the air. Locals might be able to count on some jobs from the course, if it ever opens, but the amount of water that will be needed to irrigate the course if it's to be successful will strain the community's already acute shortage of water.
The Golf Wonderland for Germany Life, with all its greenery, seems an idyll far away.
