Dan Washburn's Blog, page 3
April 23, 2015
The New York Times: China Cracks Down on Golf, the ‘Sport for Millionaires’
Austin Ramzy writes:
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 the southern province of Guangdong, home to the world’s largest golf facility, the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club, party officials have been forbidden to golf during work hours “to prevent unclean behavior and disciplinary or illegal conduct.”
The provincial anticorruption 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, traveling 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 antigraft agency declared on April 9. “The golf course is gradually changing into a muddy field where they trade money for power.”
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.
“This is Xi Jinping’s China, and it’s clear he’s intent on making his mark,” Mr. Washburn said. “Everyone’s a potential target in this ongoing crackdown on corruption, and golf is a particularly easy and obvious one.”
Read the rest here.
Listen: BBC World Service’s ‘Business Matters’ program on golf in China
BBC’s Roger Hearing talks to Dan Washburn, author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, about China’s complicated relationship with golf. This segment aired on April 9, 2015.
April 13, 2015
Listen to my appearance on Jeremy Schaap’s ‘The Sporting Life’ show on ESPN Radio
Climbing Sherpas, the Nepalese men who risk their lives to help visitors climb Mt. Everest. A crackdown on golf in China. Travis Hamonic sharing his grief to help children.
Listen to Jeremy’s April 10, 2015, episode here. You can download the show from that page, as well.
My story for CNN Money: China declares war on ‘forbidden game’ of golf
There are no Chinese golfers participating in The Masters this week, and perhaps that is fitting. It’s already been a rough spring for “the rich man’s game” in China.
On March 30, Chinese authorities announced the closure of 66 “illegal” golf courses — roughly 10% of all courses in the country — in an apparent attempt to start enforcing a long-ignored ban on golf-related construction.
The following day, the Commerce Ministry announced that one of its senior officials was under investigation for “participating in a company’s golf event,” thus putting him on the wrong side of President Xi Jinping’s “eight rules” against extravagance among government officials.
In Xi’s China, being put “under investigation” is tantamount to being found guilty. Since embarking on his seemingly ceaseless anti-corruption campaign more than two years ago, hundreds of thousands of officials at all levels of government have been put in the crosshairs.
The biggest names caught in the web are called “tigers.” That’s not a golf reference, but China’s current crackdown on the sport does show how pervasive and unpredictable Xi’s crusade has become.
Read the rest at CNN Money.
April 6, 2015
Interviewed by USA Today about China’s crackdown on golf courses
Calum MacLeod writes:
“China is full of many contradictions,” said Dan Washburn, an analyst and author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. “You never know what to expect in China, especially when related to golf. It’s a difficult place to try to figure out.”
The Communist Party banned golf and ripped up courses in the 1950s, but players teed off again in the 1980s as China opened its economy and society to capitalist ways. Viewed as “an elitist pursuit enjoyed by a very, very small percentage of the population,” the sport faces renewed pressure under Xi’s vigorous anti-corruption campaign, Washburn said.
“No government officials should afford to play the game with their salaries,” he said. “It’s a very hot button topic, as it’s pretty much a symbol of all the things that Xi Jinping is supposedly rallying against. Golf is an easy target.”
Read the whole story here.
Forbes: Why China’s ‘Illegal’ Golf Boom Is Coming To An End
Johan Nylander focuses heavily on The Forbidden Game in his piece for Forbes:
So how can something be booming and illegal at the same time?
“Golf is a politically taboo topic and tightly linked to corruption,” Dan Washburn said during a speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. “No golf course is being built in China without government involvement.”
Developers and local officials have typically side-stepped the restrictions by filing applications that designate the projects as sports training facilities, eco-parks or other creative types of developments. “Rule number one when building a golf course: don’t call it a golf course,” Washburn said.
In his book “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream”, he states that golf isn’t just a barometer for the country’s rapid economic rise. It also allows us to examine major concerns, such as the ever widening gap between rich and poor, rural land rights disputes, environmental concerns, a real-estate bubble and “plenty and plenty of corruption”.
Read the whole thing here.
Quoted in AFP story on China closing 66 ‘illegal’ golf courses
I made an oh-so-current Yakov Smirnoff reference on Twitter — and it got picked up by the AFP:
Government officials keen on joining golf clubs often do so under false names, wary of being perceived as corrupt or out of touch, according to Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream”.
Washburn pointed out on Twitter that the closure announcement came days after news that US star Tiger Woods was to be paid $16.5 million to redesign a course in the capital. “What a country!” he added.
Here’s the now famous tweet:
China crackdown shuts 66 golf courses http://t.co/E1xUDP2Vo6 Tiger to get $16.5m for Beijing redesign http://t.co/hYC4TtD86e What a country!
— Dan Washburn (@danwashburn) March 30, 2015
Washington Post: ‘A Chinese official has been placed under investigation — for golfing’
You’ll need to read this Washington Post story by Adam Taylor until the very end for the Forbidden Game reference. Or just read the money quote here:
Given that some experts see Xi’s corruption campaign as selective and politically motivated, it’ll be worth watching for whether authorities clamp down fully on China’s golfing world. “It sure seems serious this time around,” Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,” told golf.com this week.
Golf.com talks to me about China’s ‘revived government crackdown’ on golf
From Pete Madden:
There have been periodic crackdowns in the past, but Dan Washburn, managing editor of the Asia Society and the author of a book about golf in China called The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, said that course construction in China has come to an almost complete halt as the industry fears that this one could just be the beginning.
“It sure seems serious this time around,” Washburn told Golf.com. “I was just in Asia, and this was all anyone in the industry was talking about. The crackdown is indeed real — over dinner one night, I was shown photos of fairways with thousands of newly planted trees on them — and it appears to be far-reaching.”
Read the whole story, including where I say China is “an impossible country to figure out,” here.
