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If you look at the leaderboards they do look rather international and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. It's great to have this forum on which to compete.
THE FORBIDDEN GAME QUOTES PROFESSIONAL
It's a good thing for aspiring professional golfers. There's no other country in world that is putting this much focus onto its golfers. That's equipment, coaching, travel to tournaments. A men's and a women's team and the government pays for every aspect of their career. Since golf became an Olympic sport the government has funneled an unprecedented amount of money into its Olympic team. This is one of ways that China is embracing the game albeit somewhat under radar. Has golf becoming an Olympic sport helped China's acceptance of it? But that hasn't turned out to be the case. There are rumors he was a golfer himself, they thought he might be a little more open or realistic about golf development. 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. 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. No one knows the real number because it's all done under the radar. We're at the 10-year anniversary of the so-called moratorium, and there's anywhere between 600 to 1,000 courses in China. 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. It seems that golf courses are still getting built. How has Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign affected golf in China? That's why they're so eager to have these land-hungry developments come into their neighborhoods. They profit greatly from the tax revenues that these businesses bring in, but more importantly they're the ones who own the land. They view golf developments as a way to attract business to their areas, to attract a well-heeled clientele. The reasons why local governments choose to fudge things boils down to money. There's a 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. There's a ban on golf course development in China and yet golf is booming.
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It's not what people envision a professional athlete being in other parts of the world. It was a way to create a better life for themselves and their families. They were using what is known in China as the rich man's game not because there was any promise of fortune or fame, but because it was basically a better job than they could have gotten otherwise. They're blue-collar guys and they all stumbled into the game randomly and rather late in life. When I was covering the big international events, I learned about the fledgling domestic tour and a lot of the guys had remarkable backgrounds. They seemed to be the antidote to golf being called a rich man's game in China. In the book, the first wave of Chinese golf pros is rag-tag farmers-turned-golfers. Golf seemed to be a perfect window into the China that I was living in for the decade I was there. You've got the growing gap between rich and poor, this kind of Wild West real-estate development, environmental issues and lots of political intrigue.
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The growth of the game in China is a good barometer for the growth of the Chinese economy, but it also touches on many other issues.