{"id":651,"date":"2010-03-10T13:13:32","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T05:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parforchina.com\/?p=651"},"modified":"2016-05-16T11:58:12","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T15:58:12","slug":"notes-on-the-forbidden-game-my-story-in-slate-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/notes-on-the-forbidden-game-my-story-in-slate-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on “The Forbidden Game,” my story in Slate Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t already, go ahead and check out my piece<\/a> in Slate<\/em> that takes a look at China’s “golf police,” bulldozed fairways and plenty of local politics. And make sure you also peruse the companion photo essay<\/a> with images of the destroyed golf course and rural village life from Ryan Pyle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Folks unfamiliar with the way China works may be a bit confused how a country can experience a golf course boom during a supposed moratorium on golf course construction. Those who have spent time in China do not suffer from such confusion. In fact, the Chinese have several sayings for the disconnect that often exists between Beijing’s best intentions and how they are interpreted, or simply ignored, out in the provinces. Here’s a sampling:<\/p>\n

\u4e0a\u6709\u653f\u7b56, \u4e0b\u6709\u5bf9\u7b56 (sh\u00e0ng y\u01d2u zh\u00e8ng c\u00e8 , xi\u00e0 y\u01d2u du\u00ec c\u00e8)
\n\u201cWhere there are policies from above, there are counter-policies from below.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u5c71\u9ad8\u7687\u5e1d\u8fdc (sh\u0101n g\u0101o hu\u00e1ng d\u00ec yu\u01cen)
\n\u201cThe mountain is high and the emperor is far away.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u653f\u4ee4\u4e0d\u51fa\u4e2d\u5357\u6d77 (zh\u00e8ng l\u00ecng b\u00fa ch\u016b zh\u014dng n\u00e1n h\u01cei)
\n“Policies and commands stop at the gate of Zhongnanhai<\/a>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, in the case of golf, it’s debatable whether Beijing was really that serious about its 2004 “moratorium” in the first place. Golf courses are good for business \u2014 or, at least, they are supposedly a sign that business is good (for a while, anyway … the struggling U.S. has around 17,000 of them). But China is also a developing nation with 600 million peasant farmers, which explains why golf headlines coming out of the country often seem at odds with each other.<\/p>\n

For example, in my Slate<\/em> story I reference a China Daily<\/em> item from early December entitled “Golf defies rules to gain ground<\/a>,” which discusses illegal land use and the latest crackdown on golf course development. A little more than a month later, the very same state-run mouthpiece ran a story with this headline: “China on verge of a golf boom<\/a>.” It made no mention of the supposed crackdown and featured outlandish statements such as:<\/p>\n

Han Liebao, director of the Golf Education and Research Department at the Beijing Forestry University, said the appropriate number of golf courses for Beijing should be about 370, based on an assumption that every middle-class Beijinger would play one round per week<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emphasis mine. Reuters’ recent coverage of golf in China has been similarly antithetical (and at the same time accurate). On March 2 they told us China was teeing up for a “golf explosion<\/a>.” And on March 7 their headline read: “Only one of 20 Beijing golf courses legal<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why did Beijing bulldoze a tournament golf course?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":652,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[4,81,82,7,62,33,83,84,79,9],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","tag-china","tag-china-daily","tag-development","tag-golf","tag-growth","tag-media","tag-moratorium","tag-reuters","tag-slate","tag-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","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=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2118,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions\/2118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/forbiddengame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}