{"id":1675,"date":"2014-06-29T10:43:17","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T14:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2016-05-16T11:58:06","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T15:58:06","slug":"why-china-went-to-war-against-golf-my-story-in-the-sunday-telegraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/why-china-went-to-war-against-golf-my-story-in-the-sunday-telegraph\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Why China went to war against golf,’ my story in The Sunday Telegraph"},"content":{"rendered":"

“You need to hide,” the villager whispered urgently. \u201cGovernment officials have arrived.\u201d
\nI 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 \u2013 the unofficial uniform for Chinese bureaucrats.
\nThe 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 \u201crelocation village\u201d awaited them, the villagers stuck it out among the ruins, their own form of protest to what they saw as a raw deal.
\nIt was a scenario happening all over China. A developer pays a large sum of money to the local authorities for a parcel of land \u2013 all land in China is owned by the government \u2013 and a decidedly smaller sum gets filtered down to the displaced villagers who\u2019ve lived there for generations. Where did the rest of the money go? That\u2019s 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.
\nThis wasn\u2019t 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\u2019d end up hiding from government officials in a shack in Hainan, China\u2019s tropical island province.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“You need to hide,” the villager whispered urgently. \u201cGovernment officials have arrived.\u201d 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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[282,9,283],"class_list":["post-1675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","tag-articles","tag-stories","tag-the-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1678,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions\/1678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}