every hole is the nineteenth hole

Dan Washburn has more on China’s war on golf:

The most generous estimates put the number of golfers in China at a few million—statistically zero percent of the population. While the game is growing in popularity, in many developers' eyes golf courses exist primarily as a means to sell the million-dollar homes that get built around them. On a recent trip to China, a representative of an American course design firm compared the goings-on here to the Oklahoma land run combined with the California gold rush. China, the nation that banned golf development, had somehow emerged as the only country in the world still in the midst of a golf boom.

The point being that people don’t play much golf in China: it’s landscaping for estates inhabited by the “newly expensive”. There’s always been an element of status in the appeal of golf – the idea that the middle classes can afford to sequestrate huge amounts of land for the pursuit of a favoured pastime. It’s this symbolic element which seems to have been transferred to China, rather than all the fiddly business about hitting small balls with sticks. And of course, being symbolic they have to be real golf courses, or else the symbolism won’t work.

Anyway, there’s a crackdown. And yet again, Beijing is having to use satellite imagery to find out what’s actually going on in its own country, this time to locate all the rogue golf courses.

Comments

[Alex]

You're putting way too much emphasis on the satellite. One of the very first civilian satellite imaging projects, lest we forget, was NASA's LANDSAT starting in 1972. Strangely, nobody thought it was an indicator of the US's internal chaos or that of - say - Germany that they used satellite imagery to do things like making maps, updating the land registry, measuring how much land was under forest, etc etc. And it wasn't China that had to commission overhead imagery to find out how many nonexistent olive trees it was subsidising, either.

How else would you carry out a land-use survey of China? What other method would be even vaguely sane?

[jamie]

"How else would you carry out a land-use survey of China?"

Well it's not land use surveys as such, and given that most of China's huge population is contained within a comparatively small part of the country, it is odd that they seem to have no-one on the ground they can trust. I guess what tickles me about this generally is that the CPC is throwing huge resources at finding out what its own members are actually up to.

But then again, since the question is 'what else would the Chinese Community Party do?', then you're right. It's is exactly how they should be expected to behave, as well as solving the traditional Chinese governance problem - "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away", etc.

[dsquared]

It does seem relevant that the USA and Germany, while both possessed of local planning regimes of some kind, were neither of them totalitarian states. There's something much funnier about a police state having to use satellites to look for golf courses than when a democracy does it.

[Alex]

But it's just a perfect, obvious solution. It's not like satellite imagery is expensive - you can task DigitalGlobe for £50k or thereabouts, which will give you 1-metre resolution. You may recall that the good folk at John Pike's GlobalSecurity.org used to hire IKONOS regularly in the run-up to the Iraq war, and that's not much more than a guy with a Web site; and the Guardian tasked a sat last year to look for that hijacked oil tanker.

[Phil]

Yabbut a Communist state should surely just be able to phone round all its regional apparatchiks and get a near-immediate and revolutionarily trustworthy answer - particularly a Chinese Communist state, given all that emphasis on incessant activism and Serving the People. Looking down on the people from a great height is precisely what the CPC ought not to need to do.

[ejh]

"Yes, but comrade, it's not like my province is a few streets in Beijing, you know, it's twice the size of Europe, you expect me to know what's going on in every corner? Maybe in the old days, you know, but these days everything changes so fast....." (makes a few more excuses, closes conversation, goes off to play golf)

[Richard J]

should surely just be able to phone round all its regional apparatchiks and get a near-immediate and revolutionarily trustworthy answer

Yes, but that's an almighty pain in the arse, surely? It's not so much that the information isn't there, it's just collating it that's the trouble.

[Alex]

Especially when you could point a Web browser here instead.

[dsquared]

Surely a totalitarian party state ought to be able to rely on passive reporting - "Comrade Chang is building a golf course, contrary to party orders, now can I have his position"?

[jamie]

That would only work if you were part of the same guanxi network as the man you were reporting Comrade Chang to. A few more issues around the Chines bureaucracy:

There are two means of advance, through the party or the state. Peple tend to move upwards by jumping diagonally between one ladder anotheranother; this is actually a requirement, but it tends to create fairly complex relationship networks and jurisdictional issues.

generally, your grandfather is your friend. There are six basic tiers of Chinese bureaucracy (village, township, county, city/prefecture, province/provincial level city and state). You advance by lobbying the people in the layer above the layer above you to increase your power and influence. You never do anything that would give the people directly above you the chance to move in on your patch. This makes reporting things even more complicated.

And thirdly, a lot of the time the central government as a whole doesn't want to know, even if the Central Displine Inspection Commission might be interested.

It's kind of like jenga. You don't know what's going to happen when you pull out a brick, so best not to do it.

So, yeah, thinking about it it shouldnlt be too surprising that the CPC spys on its own people via satellite. It's just that the concept feels so bizarre.