GOLF clubs are places where powerful men in hideous clothes hatch shady deals. So China’s Communist Party has banned its 88m members from playing the game. The order was made public on October 21st after approval by the party’s Central Committee and endorsement by Wang Qishan, the hatchet man for President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. Its aim is to “uphold the principle that Party discipline is stricter than the law”—that is, to show that party members are selfless sorts who would rather sit through a four-hour meeting about raising crop yields than do anything bourgeois or fun. The new rules also bar party members from “excessive eating and drinking” and “improper sexual relationships”.
Golf and graft have gone together in modern China like tartan trousers and dull anecdotes. Mao Zedong is said to have denounced it as a “sport for millionaires”. But since his death, the wealthy and powerful have fallen in love with it. In the 1990s the construction of new courses boomed. It was banned in the early 2000s, but many developers simply relabelled their projects “nature resorts”. Peasants whose paddy fields were bulldozed...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/1SbDYnD
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