Dan Washburn's Blog

Wayne Ma reports:

China has nearly 1.4 billion people, but at most perhaps three million golfers, Gilligan said. New golf-course construction has technically been banned since 2004, and the country has less than 500 courses—compared with more than 14,000 in the U.S.

The sport has long been a symbol of Western excess in the minds of many Chinese, said Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream.”

Chairman Mao “labeled golf the sport for millionaires, and, honestly, that’s still what golf is to this day in China,” Washburn said. “No government official should be able to afford to play a round of golf, let alone own a golf-club membership. It is out of reach of all but the very wealthy.”

Had a nice conversation with Hannah McBride at 60dB. Here’s the description:

At Mar-a-lago this week, President Donald Trump hosts President Xi Jinping of China for the first time. Xi has led anti-corruption campaigns targeting golf as the sport of millionaires, but Trump’s made a sport of “golf diplomacy.” Author Dan Washburn on golf, China and the Trump-Xi summit.

Listen to the episode.

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.”

Tripti Lahiri and Isabella Steger, reporting for Quartz:

In his 2014 book on golf in China, The Forbidden Game, Dan Washburn chronicled how a 2004 ban on the construction of new golf courses was accompanied by the building of more golf courses than ever.

“People unfamiliar with the way China works often express confusion as to how a country can experience a golf course boom during a moratorium on golf course construction,” he wrote. ” Those who’ve spent more than five minutes in China do not suffer from such confusion.”

Usually, this happens by maintaining a low profile, often using the word “leisure” instead of “golf” during development. One golf club Washburn looked at for his book started life as the mysterious-sounding “Project 791,” but is better known as the Mission Hills China resort now. The coyness of those early days appears to have disappeared, with the Mission Hills website describing its chairman, Ken Chu, as China’s “Mr. Golf.” The site also notes that he serves as a national committee member of the Communist Party’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. (Mission Hills didn’t respond to an interview request for this story).

Steven Jiang writes:

Xi, an avid soccer fan, isn’t known to be a golfer — and he’s been waging a war on the sport in his country.
Since he came to power nearly five years ago, Xi’s government has shut down scores of golf courses across China and effectively banned the 88 million members of the ruling Communist Party from playing.
“For Xi, golf is just such a touchy topic back home, saddled with so much baggage — the optics would be awful, with or without Trump,” said Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,” a book on the tumultuous history of golf in China.
“It’s a symbol of the corruption Xi has been railing against,” he added. “It represents a lot of the things he has spent much of his presidency fighting, so it’s hard to envision the government embracing the game any time soon — at least publicly.”

My contribution to The New York Times‘ new “Sporting” column about my time chasing the bizarre story of golf in China:

It was a foggy day in Chongqing, a metropolis in southwest China, and the driving range was almost empty. Out beyond the 250-yard marker, a cluster of new high-rise apartment buildings was barely visible, blurred by the haze into a mountainous shadow that made this decidedly urban setting feel unusually secluded.

I was just fine with that. The fewer people to watch me swing a golf club, the better.

It was early 2008, and I was hitting balls at Haoyun Golf Club, a driving range in one of the many new development areas sprouting up around Chongqing, often called sprawling but really just enormous: roughly the size of South Carolina, with a population of around 30 million.

I sprayed balls to the left and to the right, where a large billboard advertised a Saab station wagon with a Chinese slogan that translated to something like “soar straight ahead.”

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked Zhou Xunshu, Haoyun’s top coach and the man whose remarkable life story became my obsession for the better part of a decade.

Catherine Kovach lumps me in with some pretty amazing company in Bustle</a>:

Of course, since this is reality, of course it’s possible for people who love sports and books at the same time. In fact, some stories about the sports industry can be even more complicated and fascinating than Game of Thrones (which is saying something). Whether it’s football, baseball, or golf, there has to be a strategy, there has to be planning, and that’s when things end up getting pretty cool. If you’re a bookworm who is dying for some inside glimpses at the sports world, I’ve compiled a list of ten nonfiction books about sports. From the forbidden golf courses of modern China to the Kentucky Derby circa the late 1930’s, these books will definitely score some points with you.

Tim Marcin writes in the International Business Times:

“The question has always been: Will Olympic success in golf equal a golf boom in China?” said Dan Washburn, author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream.” “It was and remains a down time for the golf industry in China, but at the same time as all of these crackdowns, China did start funneling a lot of money — an unprecedented amount of money — into its Olympic golf program.”

It makes sense that China’s focus on medal counts could help grow the game, Washburn said. But Beijing could turn against the sport at any time.

“A lot of very smart people have been made to look very dumb by trying to predict what’s going to happen in China,” Washburn said.

Larry Ong writes for Epoch Times:

Dan Washburn, the leading authority on golf in China and author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,” told the Washington Post: “As is common in China, the regulation’s language does seem vague, perhaps purposefully so.”

“But the simple fact remains: No Chinese government official should be able to afford to play golf in the first place,” Washburn added.

Adam Taylor writes in The Washington Post:

Dan Washburn, perhaps the foremost Western expert on golf in China and author of “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream,” says that the idea that golf has been made legal is a misinterpretation of the previous guidelines: Golf was never actually illegal in China for either average citizens or party members, he argues. “As is common in China, the regulation’s language does seem vague, perhaps purposefully so,” Washburn writes in an email. “It doesn’t explicitly say that Party members are forbidden to play golf, just that they can’t own golf memberships.”