{"id":537,"date":"2009-11-30T18:05:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T10:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.parforchina.com\/blog\/?p=537"},"modified":"2016-05-16T11:58:13","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T15:58:13","slug":"the-wall-street-journal-on-golf-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/the-wall-street-journal-on-golf-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wall Street Journal on golf in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal<\/em>‘s Jonathan Cheng recently interviewed me for his story “Beijing Pulls Out Its Driver<\/a>,” which appeared in the November 27, 2009 print edition. The piece \u2014 which spends a lot of time discussing Mission Hills Golf Club, in Shenzhen \u2014 focuses on the prospects for golf’s growth in China now that it is an Olympic sport. Here’s a snippet:<\/p>\n

Dan Washburn, a Shanghai-based writer who is researching a book on golf in China, says that if there are medals to be had in golf, China will try its hardest to produce medalists. “They’ll train them from a young age, and they’ll be state-funded, like other Olympic sports,” he says. Given China’s track record at the Beijing Games, where it won 51 gold medals, the most of any nation, it might be a bad idea to bet against it on the golf course.<\/p>\n

… [G]olf’s mainstream popularity in China is still many years away. Land is expensive here, and official concerns about the growing wealth gap in a country that still has 600 million farmers have forced the government to impose a nominal moratorium on new golf courses.<\/p>\n

“Golf will continue to grow in participation in China as the economy grows, but I don’t think it’ll become a mainstream game because of the resources necessary,” says Mr. Washburn, the writer. “It’s going to be an elitist and prohibitively expensive sport in China for the foreseeable future.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal<\/em> interviewed me for their story “Beijing Pulls Out Its Driver.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[4,7,62,33,63,49,21,64],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","tag-china","tag-golf","tag-growth","tag-media","tag-mission-hills","tag-olympics","tag-press","tag-wsj"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","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=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2123,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/2123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}