China Closes 66 'Illegal' Golf Courses


Various news services are reporting that China's government has decided to enforce a decade-old ban on golf, closing 66 "illegal" courses in the Communist country.

The announcement, made Monday by the Ministry of Land and Resources, is the result of an anti-graft campaign led by President Xi Jinping. The prohibition has also focused on lavish banquets, gift-giving and other official excesses.

Despite golf being a lucrative resource and the preferred sport by some officials, its association with wealth and Western thinking has made the game anathema to China's hegemony. The government is also responding to public anger over China's widening gap in affluence between its citizens.

"Presently, local governments have shut down a number of illegally-built golf courses, and preliminary results have been achieved in clean-up and rectification work," read an announcement on the ministry's website late Monday.

That announcement was followed Tuesday by a commerce ministry statement that senior official Wang Shenyang was being investigated for playing golf in violation of Xi's "eight rules" on official behavior.

In 2014 the ruling party's anti-graft commission in Guangdong announced that provincial Communist officials would face punishment if they engaged in any of nine golf-related activities, including joining a golf club. The notice urged the public to report any suspected violations through a telephone hotline.

The Land Resources Ministry did not give reasons for the facilities' closure, although the 2004 ban indicated that golf courses use too much water. A spokeswoman for the China Golf Association, which is supervised by the nation's sports ministry, did not comment on the latest move.

Government officials who join golf clubs often do so under assumed names, wary of being perceived as corrupt or out of touch with Communist philosophy, according to Dan Washburn, author of "The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream."

Washburn wrote on Twitter that the closure announcement came days after news Tiger Woods would be paid $16.5 million to redesign a course in China's capital city of Beijing. "What a country!" Washburn noted.

Adding to the irony is that the $8.5 million WGC-HSBC Champions is a professional tournament - sanctioned by the PGA and European tours - involving the world's top players and boasting the largest purse outside the U.S. and U.K.