'Crackdown on golf and gluttony," the headlines announced with irresistible alliteration. One Chinese paper refered to it as the "green opium", and the People's Daily called golf "a kind of elegant bribery". In March, the government announced it had closed 66 illegally built courses, but now the Politburo of China's Communist Party Central Committee has decided to proscribe the game entirely for all 88 million of its members in a new eight-article moral and ethical code of conduct. Alongside excessive eating and drinking, while a previous ban on "keeping paramours and committing adultery" has been toughened to outlaw all "improper sexual relations."
All just weeks before the world’s best golfers arrive in Shanghai for one of the biggest and most lucrative tournaments of the year, the WGC-HSBC Champions, with $8.5 million in prize money.
Mao Zedong regarded golf as a frivolous and bourgeois Western import and banned it. But it has thrived in China since legalised in the mid-90s. There are now up to 1,000 courses though some, shy of the attention of the latterday Red Guards, are not exactly advertising. Fancy a round at the "Yangshan District Land Consolidation and Ecological Project" in Hainan?
Not unlike our own GAA’s onetime ban on “garrison games” because of their association with the old enemy, China is using the sport as a political whipping boy for the enemy of the day, not capitalism but “corruption”.
Many officials apparently use the golf course to do self-enriching deals with business people. Fancy that! President Xi Jinping, a soccer fan, launched a drive against corruption last year when the party “disciplined” or “severely disciplined” more than 95,000 cadres.
Golf widows across China will applaud, while party ideologists will labour to elaborate inherently “anti-people” dimensions to the game in Marxist terminology: fostering individualism, not a team ethic; anti-family; exploitative of the caddie proletariat; expensive/elitist; an affront to fashion ... Not to putt a tooth in it, maybe the Chinese are right. A hole in one.