A golf course in Shenzhen, China. The Communist Party has decreed that golf is not a crime. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters
The Guardian: Golf is no longer a crime, decrees China's Communist party
Once rejected as the sport of millionaires by Mao, China now says there is is ‘no right or wrong’ about playing golf
Teeing off is not a crime, the Communist party of China has decreed, lifting millions of fairway fanatics out of the rough.
Banned by Mao Zedong – who despised the “sport for millionaires” – golf enjoyed a renaissance during the 80s and 90s only to be outlawed for the party’s 85 million members in 2015 as a result of president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive.
Articles in the party-controlled media have painted China’s golf courses as cauldrons of profiteering where the palms of rotten officials are greased by favour-seeking business people.
“The golf course is gradually changing into a muddy field where they trade money for power,” one state-run newspaper complained in 2015.
Party leaders appeared to step back from their condemnation of the game this week.
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WNU Editor: My first set of clubs came from a Canadian diplomat who gave my father a set of clubs in the early 1980s .... who passed it to me (he had no interest in the game). But there were no golf courses in the former Soviet Union at the time. No problem .... I practiced at a track field until the grounds-people kicked me off when they realized I was destroying their grass. I first started playing golf in China around 1986-1987 .... and it was (if my memory serves me correctly) at a golf course in Guangdong Province, China (this was China`s first `real`golf course, and it was designed by Arnold Palmer). I had a lot of fun .... and my lousy playing looked golden when compared to my Chinese friends .... who loved the game but had zero ability. Playing golf with the Chinese also helped me in opening scores of doors .... I got to know scores of mayors, Provincial premiers, business leaders, and senior Beijing officials .... and all because of our addiction to a little ball and the need to hit it and put it in a little hole in the ground. My colleagues in the Soviet FO could never understand how I was able to build a huge Rolodex of contacts in China that their own senior officials in Beijing could not even hope to match .... or why was I invited to special events when they were not. The stories that I can tell .... the heavy drinking and eating at Hole #19 .... the memories .... I could fill a book.