CHINA has been described as one big construction site, with new buildings going up all the time. Some weeks ago, diggers and cranes started tearing up a stretch of farmland beside a highway east of Beijing. But when I passed it the other day there was no sign of any new high rise structure, despite the labour of hundreds of workers.
Then I noticed several strangely shaped mounds and artificial lakes in the morning mist where none had been before, and realised what was going on. These were the greens and water hazards of a new golf course taking shape among the peasant villages, the latest in this communist country where the most capitalist of games is catching on fast.
The first post revolution golf course, the Zhongshan Spring Golf Club in Guangdong province, was laid out 13 years ago in Guangdong Province in the south, and one new course a year was built over the next 10 years, but 20 more have appeared in the last two years alone and there will be 100 all over China by the turn of the century.
The original courses were purely foreign funded ventures to attract international tourists designed by up market specialists like Jack Nicklaus. They were too exclusive and expensive for the locals, and remote from their sporting experience. Still, today only a tiny percentage of Chinese can even think of swinging a driver on the first tee. A round of 18 holes at the Ming Tomb course north of Beijing, with its dramatic views of the Great Wall from the high tees, costs the equivalent of IR£80, or twice the average Beijinger's monthly salary, and most of the players, not surprisingly, are expatriates and tourists.
But things are changing. In Beijing, you can see government officials loading golf clubs into the boots of their cars and heading out of town after work. A golf shop opened last week in the city's Kunlun Hotel, attracting curious stares from staff who have never seen a putter or a nine iron. In the more free wheeling southern provinces especially, a new generation of Chinese golfers is beginning to make its presence felt on the fairways.
"It's just beginning to happen," said Mr Tony Dubery, a construction engineer, originally from Ardee, Co Louth, who is senior project manager for China's latest course, the Nansha Golf Club, about an hour's drive from Guangzhou, the bustling capital of Guangdong Province. "Locals are beginning to play in large numbers. They are mostly people with leverage, entrepreneurs, police, customs officials, government officials, people holding positions of security.
"Golf in China is exactly at the stage it was at in Ireland 20 or 30 years ago," explained Mr Dubery, who came to China four years ago after 25 years working abroad. "If you want to be in with the boss, if you want privileges, you play golf. That is how you advance your career. Some swing the club as if it were a hoe, but once they get into it they make damn good players. They take to it like ducks to water."
His former Chinese interpreter, for example, learned to play reasonably well and had got ahead by making himself available for an occasional round of golf to the local mayor. "He never wins, but he only just loses," explained Mr Dubery with a chuckle. Another project engineer a former army man in his 50s, who had never seen a g&lf course in his life before, "now plays every day so regularly that I know if I want to contact him at 4 o'clock I will find him at the 6th hole".
"More and more people have found the value of golf," said Mr Cui Zhiquing, secretary general of the Chinese Golf Association. "They stepped out of karaoke onto the golf course. I'm optimistic about the future of the sport in China."
There is some way to go before the People's Republic produces a Tiger Woods, or a future communist leader can bond with an American president on the putting green, but the Chinese regularly bent the world in a game with a similar sized ball - ping pong - and will be a force to reckon with when they apply the same fierce concentration and competitive spirit to professional golf.
"The golf market in China is now more bullish than the Shenzhen stocks," said Zhang Lainwei, the best of China's 20 professional players who has just won $32,000 by coming second in the third Volvo China Open in Beijing. He has already won two masters in Malaysia and Thailand.
Zhang (32), who was named Asia Golfer of the Year for 1996, said: "I can tell the world - Hey! China is catching up in the sport."