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Editor's note: This article was originally published in LINKS Magazine. Visit the magazine website here.
By George Peper
Thirty-seven cranes. That's what I saw when I parted the hotel room curtains on my first morning in Beijing. And I'm not talking about the graceful, long-necked, pond-wading variety. No, these were the 200-tons-of-hydraulically-articulating-steel kind. One leaned straight at me from the 30th floor of a structure across the street. Three more bobbed up and down in the foundation of a building site two blocks away, while another sat incongruously in the center of a rush-hour traffic jam. Across the horizon, every point on the compass sported at least one specimen of China's new national bird.
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Eighty percent of the world's construction cranes are in Asia, and 80 percent of those are in China, the most populous nation and now the fastest growing economy in the world. Shanghai, which had just one skyscraper in 1985, now has more than 300 of them, while Beijing has no fewer than 7,000 buildings under construction, many of them rising at the rate of one floor per week.
As the People's Republic continues its remarkable transition from communism to capitalism, personal wealth is rising just as dramatically as the skylines. The average Chinese citizen enjoys 10 times the purchasing power of a quarter century ago, and the nation will soon have more than a million millionaires. The Chinese are the third largest consumers of luxury brands -- from Rolls-Royce to Dom Perignon to Cartier -- just behind the U.S. and Japan, but within five years they will be first.
Much of that spending will be on golf. A century after America became addicted to the game, the Middle Kingdom has caught the bug in a big way, as Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book" has fallen out of favor for Harvey Penick's.
In 1983 there were no golf courses in China. Now there are 310, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Some predictions call for as many as a thousand new courses in the next 10 years, a pace so alarmingly rapid that the government recently imposed a moratorium on construction, in the interest of protecting the nation's arable land. In modern China, however, where there's a will -- accompanied by sufficient cash -- there's a way, so the course boom has continued virtually unabated.
I wasn't sure what to expect. Word was that most of the early Chinese courses had been created hastily on shoestring budgets and were forgettable at best. On the other hand, China has attracted a few big-name designers -- Trent Jones Jr., Nicklaus, Norman, etc.-- and I was curious to see what they had produced.
Sharks and Cobras
So after the obligatory tour of the Beijing sights -- the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City -- I got down to business with a three-hour flight to the city of Shenzhen, at the southern tip of China, and a visit to the Mission Hills Resort.
A few hundred yards after we passed through the guarded gate, my jaw dropped. In front of us was a hole with a group of four golfers and their caddies on the tee and another group putting out. Hardly remarkable, except that it was 10 minutes past midnight. At Mission Hills, golf is played under floodlights until 2 a.m.
Indeed, at this place everything is done in a big way. Mission Hills is the brainchild of David Chu, a Hong Kong businessman who made a fortune in corrugated paper. In 1992 Chu had a vision of building the largest golf resort in the world. Thirteen years and nearly half a billion dollars later, he reached his goal with the completion of Mission Hills' ninth and 10th courses, two more than Pinehurst.
Yes, 180 holes of golf, serviced from a pro shop the size of the Astrodome and staffed by an army of 2,400 female caddies in red uniforms with enormous white bonnets. The first course at Mission Hills was a Jack Nicklaus design that opened in 1994, joined in short order by designs from Ernie Els, Nick Faldo,
Jumbo Ozaki and Vijay Singh (or at least they lent their signatures and cut the opening-day ribbons). Then in 2002 Chu doubled his leisure with five more courses, by David Duval, David Leadbetter, Greg Norman, Jose Maria Olazabal and Annika Sorenstam, on a more rugged and dramatic tract of land a few miles away. Astonishingly, all five were constructed simultaneously over 18 months, thanks to a force of 30,000 laborers working around the clock.
