Benjamin Haas reports:
For years golf was banned as a bourgeois indulgence, and more recently China’s 85 million Communist party members were forbidden from playing the sport amid a broad crackdown on corruption.
The regulation was later lifted – as long as cadres hit the links at their own expense. In one notorious case, a senior commerce ministry official was removed from office for using public money to play golf.
“I think there’s a long list of things that Donald Trump will not be able to get Xi Jinping to do, and I’d put playing golf close to the top,” said Dan Washburn, author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream.
“The last, and only, Chinese leader to be open about his golfing habit was in power back in the 1980s, and he spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest.”