The Wall Street Journal on golf in China

The Wall Street Journal on golf in China November 30, 2009

WSJ - November 27, 2009

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Cheng recently interviewed me for his story “Beijing Pulls Out Its Driver,” which appeared in the November 27, 2009 print edition. The piece — which spends a lot of time discussing Mission Hills Golf Club, in Shenzhen — focuses on the prospects for golf’s growth in China now that it is an Olympic sport. Here’s a snippet:

Dan Washburn, a Shanghai-based writer who is researching a book on golf in China, says that if there are medals to be had in golf, China will try its hardest to produce medalists. “They’ll train them from a young age, and they’ll be state-funded, like other Olympic sports,” he says. Given China’s track record at the Beijing Games, where it won 51 gold medals, the most of any nation, it might be a bad idea to bet against it on the golf course.

… [G]olf’s mainstream popularity in China is still many years away. Land is expensive here, and official concerns about the growing wealth gap in a country that still has 600 million farmers have forced the government to impose a nominal moratorium on new golf courses.

“Golf will continue to grow in participation in China as the economy grows, but I don’t think it’ll become a mainstream game because of the resources necessary,” says Mr. Washburn, the writer. “It’s going to be an elitist and prohibitively expensive sport in China for the foreseeable future.”

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About Par for China

I am Dan Washburn, an American writer based in Shanghai, China. I am currently researching an as-yet-publisherless book about the development of golf in China. Golf, its emergence and growth in China, is a barometer for the country's rapid economic rise. But golf is also symbolic of the less glamorous realities of a nation's awkward and arduous evolution from developing to developed — historical prejudice, class struggle, political corruption, environmental neglect, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. This website is dedicated to some of my work on the topic. My writing has appeared in such publications as Slate, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, Foreign Policy, ESPN.com, Golf World, GOOD, Budget Travel, Economist.com, Outside's GO, Business China (part of The Economist), Baseball America and the South China Morning Post. In 2008, a piece of mine was featured in the book Inside The Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On, an anthology of the best of participatory sports journalism. (more)

Featured on NBC Nightly News

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Quoted in The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Cheng interviewed me for his story "Beijing Pulls Out Its Driver," which appeared in the November 27, 2009 print edition. You can read the story here.