Golf out of bounds for mere party apparatchiks

CHINA’S NEW rich have taken to golf with gusto, but as 20 officials discovered to their cost, the Communist Party still has not embraced the ultra-capitalist sport known here as “green opium”.

City government officials in Wenzhou, a famously entrepreneurial city in Zhejiang province, were reprimanded after they were publicly linked to a high-end golf club that charges 398,000 yuan (€45,773) to join.

That's 40 times the average annual income of farmers in Zhejiang. The Wenzhou Evening Newsran an advertisement about "China's most awe-inspiring golf club" listing the officials, and local people reacted angrily saying officials should not be involved with such bourgeois decadence.

The Wenzhou municipal party committee met to reprimand the officials, including Wang Chaojun, the city’s deputy Communist Party secretary who was chairman of the golf club.

The party members were asked to leave the club.

The incident happened as China’s best-known golfer, Liang Wenchong, broke the course record at Whistling Straights by a stroke during the PGA championship in the United States.

News of his feat did not make major headlines because Sunday was a day of national mourning in China following the mudslide in the west of the country last week.

Golf is still an elite sport in China, and the only senior Chinese government leader known to have played golf was Zhao Ziyang, the disgraced former potentate who backed the students during the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

There are more than 300 golf courses in China, mostly in the south, compared to just 20 or so in the 1980s.

The golf market is estimated to be worth €5.5 billion a year, and is growing by 20 per cent annually.

As in other countries, golf is seen as a status sport, as a way of oiling the gears when it comes to building contacts and setting up deals. The central government has put a ban on the construction of new golf courses because of land grabbing, where land was taken by dodgy property developers, often with the connivance of corrupt local officials, leading to social unrest as disenfranchised farmers take to the streets and demonstrate.

China’s arable land is scarce, and the government is worried about a growing wealth gap between the rich of the cities and the poor in the countryside.

China’s love of the Olympics means that official attitudes to golf might change in 2016, when golf becomes an Olympic event.