Dan Washburn's Blog, page 8

Watch: In-studio interview with Golf.com

Last week I sat down with Jessica Marksbury in Golf.com’s New York studio to talk about The Forbidden Game and China’s complicated relationship with golf. Watch above, or click here.

I was also quoted in a related story, “China’s recent golf course crackdown masks staggering pace of construction.”

ESPN.com runs exclusive excerpt from The Forbidden Game

The following excerpt comes from Dan Washburn’s new book “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,” which follows the lives of three men caught up in China’s bizarre — and, in some cases, illegal — golf scene. The passage below focuses on Zhou Xunshu, whose inspiring underdog story takes him from peasant farmer to security guard to professional golfer.

Read the rest at ESPN.com.

Q&A with the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog

Here’s a snippet of my chat with The Wall Street Journal’s Alyssa Abkowitz:

THERE’S A BAN ON GOLF COURSE DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA AND YET GOLF IS BOOMING. HOW DOES THAT WORK?

There’s a [Chinese] saying I have in the book, “the mountain is high but the emperor is far away.” That sums up the disconnect that exists between Beijing and its best intentions, and the government officials in the provinces who may have a different interpretation of these rules or just choose to ignore them all together. The reasons why local governments choose to fudge things boils down to money. They view golf developments as a way to attract business to their areas, to attract a well-heeled clientele. They profit greatly from the tax revenues that these businesses bring in, but more importantly they’re the ones who own the land. That’s why they’re so eager to have these land-hungry developments come into their neighborhoods.

HOW HAS XI JINPING’S ANTICORRUPTION CAMPAIGN AFFECTED GOLF IN CHINA?

It seems that golf courses are still getting built. You can say it’s illegal, but you almost need to put quote marks around illegal because more golf courses are getting built in China than anywhere else in the world. We’re at the 10-year anniversary of the so-called moratorium, and there’s anywhere between 600 to 1,000 courses in China. No one knows the real number because it’s all done under the radar. A few years ago the government was trying to get a handle on the number of golf courses and they said they were going to utilize satellite technology to find that out.

Related to Xi Jinping, a lot of people in the industry, when they first learned he was going to be the next leader of China, were somewhat optimistic that he may bring a different mindset. There are rumors he was a golfer himself, they thought he might be a little more open or realistic about golf development. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case.

Read the rest at WSJ’s China Real Time blog.

Jing Daily Q&A about Forbidden Game and golf in China

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT THE “CHINESE DREAM” FROM CHINA’S GOLF INDUSTRY?

I think the very fact that a golf industry exists in China is a sign that the Chinese Dream is alive and well for some. There are few things more aspirational in nature than golf in China. It’s so costly to play the game, so expensive to purchase a home near a course, that the activity and the life that surrounds it has become as much a symbol of “making it” in China as a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Audi A6. But I think the larger world surrounding the game shows that the Chinese Dream means different things to different people. Very few can afford the mansion with the fairway view or even the golf club membership. For Zhou, golf allowed him to simply dream of a better life beyond his village or workers dorm. For Wang, although he may have felt forced to sell his land to a golf development, the money he made from the transaction allowed him to dream of a better future for his children in a time a great uncertainty for so many others—a sign that the Chinese Dream is not yet attainable for all.

Read the entire interview at Jing Daily.

Listen: Forbidden Game featured on public radio’s Marketplace

Had a nice talk with Marketplace‘s David Gura last week. You can listen to part of it above, or at their website.

The Economist reviews The Forbidden Game, calls book ‘gripping’ and ‘revealing’

For Mr Washburn golf is symbolic not only of China’s economic rise but also of “the less glamorous realities of a nation’s awkward and arduous evolution from developing to developed: corruption, environmental neglect, disputes over rural land rights and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor”.

He tackles these great themes indirectly, by interweaving the stories of three men whose lives were affected by the golf boom. One is Mr Zhou, whose rise from peasant to professional golfer is, as Mr Washburn puts it, “the stuff of movies”. Hugely talented but utterly skint, Mr Zhou struggled for years to make a living playing a rich man’s game. He travelled to tournaments on slow trains because he could not afford to fly and slept in sordid flophouses miles from the courses.

When he earned enough to buy a flat in Chongqing, he urged his parents to come and live with him. They would be able to rest after 60 years sweating in the fields, he said. Finally they agreed, and came and filled his flat with live roosters. But they were homesick for their dirty village. As soon as their son flew away for a tournament, they went home to their friends and their corn. Anecdotes like this bring China to life in a way that outlandish-but-true statistics—some 250m peasants have moved to Chinese cities—cannot.

The book’s other main characters are Martin Moore, an American who builds golf courses, and Wang Libo, a lychee farmer whose land is bulldozed to make way for one. Both tales are as gripping as they are revealing.

Read the rest: “Golf in China: Birdies, bribes and bulldozers“

‘Why China went to war against golf,’ my story in The Sunday Telegraph

“You need to hide,” the villager whispered urgently. “Government officials have arrived.”

I was whisked away through a maze of shanties, trees and rubble, and finally placed inside a crudely-made shed where my only companions were discarded coconut husks and a rooster. Through a gap in the wall I spotted men wearing eyeglasses and white short-sleeve, button-up dress shirts tucked into black pleated trousers – the unofficial uniform for Chinese bureaucrats.

The officials were there for the same reason I was: to talk with villagers living in makeshift shacks built atop the remains of their original homes, which had been torn down to make room for a luxury golf resort some two years earlier. Even though new homes in a “relocation village” awaited them, the villagers stuck it out among the ruins, their own form of protest to what they saw as a raw deal.

It was a scenario happening all over China. A developer pays a large sum of money to the local authorities for a parcel of land – all land in China is owned by the government – and a decidedly smaller sum gets filtered down to the displaced villagers who’ve lived there for generations. Where did the rest of the money go? That’s the question that causes tempers to fray. Not far from this village, a similar dispute involving a golf course and land compensation had resulted in a mass demonstration. Protesters smashed and overturned local police cars. Then the military police showed up and dispersed the crowd with tear gas.

This wasn’t what I expected when I first started writing about golf in China. I never realised so many of my conversations would have to be off the record, so much research would have to be conducted surreptitiously, or that I’d end up hiding from government officials in a shack in Hainan, China’s tropical island province.

Read the rest here.

New Statesman: Forbidden Game ‘an illuminating portrait of modern China’

Simon Kuper writes:

The Forbidden Game uses golf – a game that most in the country probably still know nothing about – to gain a rare insight into ordinary Chinese lives. Washburn, the managing editor of the Asia Society in the US, was a reporter in China when he began covering golf tournaments. A Stakhanovite worker, he spent years trekking to the least glamorous corners of the country and has ended up with interlinked portraits of three men touched by the rise of golf in China. … An illuminating portrait of modern China.

Read the rest at The New Statesman.

Listen: Ireland’s NewsTalk radio on The Forbidden Game

Had a nice chat with Sean Moncrieff of Ireland’s NewsTalk radio station not long ago. Listen above or here.