This month China hosts two of the biggest events in golf – the HSBC Masters and the Omega Mission Hills World Cup. The popularity of the sport is rising fast here, and China’s top players are a fascinating and diverse group, but exorbitant prices and a government ban on golf course construction raise questions about the game's future.

Farms Versus Fairways

BBC Presenter Chris Packham caused an uproar recently when he suggested that the millions of dollars spent on protecting the Giant Panda might be better used elsewhere. "I reckon we should pull the plug,” he told The Radio Times. “Let them go, with a degree of dignity.”

It’s a heretical statement, and one made even more maddening by the nagging suspicion that Packham’s brutal logic holds. Golf too is much loved but it consumes considerable resources. Chinese leaders have singled out the sport, known here as ‘green opium’, for special constraint, banning the construction of golf courses on agricultural land.

Journalist Dan Washburn (pictured below) has covered golf in China for publications like Golf World, The South China Morning Post and ESPN.com. “There are definitely good intentions behind that ban,” he says. “As we know, land rights issues are a huge topic in China and a huge focus of Hu Jintao’s regime. It’s a nation of 600 million farmers, there’s still very little arable land, and you’ve got a huge population to feed.” Furthermore, golf courses compete with farms for water, a particular concern in the north of the country.

Yet the ban is not really preventing golf courses from being built. 

“There have been quote-unquote bans on golf course construction going back to the early 1990s,” Washburn says, and a blanket ban on building golf courses on undeveloped land was issued in 2004. “Technically that ban is still in place but the number of golf courses has tripled in that time. It’s a regulation that’s issued with a wink and a nod. There are many loopholes: you just don’t call your project a golf course, you call it something else. It’s an ecotourism resort that just happens to have a golf course in it.” 

The Golf Benchmark Survey, a study conducted by KPMG, found that at the end of 2008 there were about 300 golf courses open for play in China. According to Washburn, “Unofficially there’s probably five or six hundred courses in China and there are many, many big projects on the way.” 

The KPMG survey also made the observation that if just 0.1 per cent of China’s population are playing golf by 2030, “China would have 1.3 million golfers.” The study estimates a total of 2,000 golf courses will be needed to meet this demand. Inferences about the size of future markets made by nominating a low percentage of China’s population should be taken with a grain of salt, but there is little doubt China’s golfing population is rapidly on the rise. 

“Some people say it’s growing 50 per cent every year, some say 30 per cent,” Washburn says. “It’s a really hard thing to quantify, but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t grow; it seems quite natural that the world’s fastest growing economy will also see growth in golf.” 

Unless more severe restrictions are placed on construction, that demand is likely to be met. “I think you’re going to see courses growing at such a pace that, even if we see that [player] boom, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue,” Washburn says. “China is one of the only countries in the world where golf course construction is a growth industry.”