The green light - China legalises golf

ENTHUSIASTIC golfers will be delighted to know that China’s ruling Communist Party has softened its hard line on the diversion.

Banned as decadent and bourgeois by chairman Mao Zedong, his successors thought it a material and environmental excess that facilitated the corruption of moderately paid government officials invited to play on courses far beyond their pay scale.

The game is expanding in China, despite a theoretical ban since 2004 and there are over 500 courses. These “Green Opium” playgrounds were built despite environmental concerns, especially around the huge quantities of often scarce water required, and the conversion of arable land into something divorced from food production. Ironically these are the very issues forcing the closure, or at least the restriction, of golf courses in California and other drought-ridden areas of America’s southwest.

That, according to a 2015 report by KPMG, 51,000 people in Britain or Ireland have quit the game since 2014, adds another layer of irony to China’s let-them-play decision.