Getting into the swing of things on the Chinese fairways

Caddie's Role: They say that in China they ask for forgiveness first and then they ask for permission to build a golf course. With a population of 1.4 billion people there is no doubt the game can only get more popular in China. But with the rapid development of so many courses until 2003, when the government put a hold to any more course expansion, there was some serious concern that the rice fields were going to turn into fairways.

Officially there are some 240 courses in China and according to those involved with course building there are plenty of developers willing to impress the necessary officials enough to warrant them not noticing the earth moving and of clearing peasant land under their noses. Of the four courses that I have visited in the new golfing land, judging by the size of their clubhouses there must be a strong hope for taking in new members, many of them look like small airport terminals.

Last week we were on the holiday island of Hainan set in the balmy South China sea about an hour flight from Hong Kong. I could not get anyone to put a figure on the local population but it seems to be greater than that of our own island and about half the size of it.

The government has decided to make this a tourist destination and they are well on the way to realising this goal. We were at the exclusive Yalong Bay area of the island.

There is an Hawaiian feel to the place, with high hills covered in rich foliage, cook pines and palm trees and some pretty clean looking beaches, albeit without the waves, the Chinese may well be entitled to compare their version of paradise to the true paradise of Hawaii.

Us Irish seem to have progressed from venturing to southern Europe for our golfing trips, to travelling further a field to the Middle East and on into South East Asia. I wonder if many Europeans would consider south China as a future destination for their golf trip, because the Chinese government thinks that they will.

There are over 10 huge resort hotels which have sprung up over the last five years. The main course here, the Yalong Bay county club was designed by Robert Trent Jones junior seven years ago and there have been no fewer than three professional events held at the same course all in the one year.

This is very much the high end of the market, golf will not be cheap as it would be about US$100 for a round but at least you will not have to book too far in advance, it is still all relatively tranquil on the Chinese fairways.

If the nation develops its taste for this new game at the rate it has adopted the influx of other western influences then the chances are tee times will not be so easy to come by in future years. They estimate that some 500,000 Chinese play golf. That may well be a loose interpretation of what constitutes a golfer. It is so new and raw here that figures are hard to take seriously.

With an average middle-class Chinese family earning about US$15,000 a year and average green fee of US$100 it is hard to see the game grabbing the nation quite so fast although having been at some events here there are obviously plenty of very wealthy Chinese. It does not take a huge percentage of 1.4 billion people to amount to a lot of new golfers.

Car manufacturers see golf as a good vehicle for their products and they sponsor three of the six Chinese events on the Asian Tour schedule this year.

Volkswagen are the reason that Retief Goosen, Michael Campbell and Philip Price made the long and cumbersome trip from Europe to the south China seas last week. If they want to make Hainan a tourist destination they need to make international connections a little more accommodating than they are at present.

We ended up flying to Shenzhen, which is on the Chinese side of the Hong Kong border, late on Sunday in order to make the hour-and-a-half-road trip across the border and back into Hong Kong, spent the night there and resumed our trip back to Europe the next day. It is certainly not on the package golf trip map yet, but I am sure the Chinese have plans to make it more accessible.

There are also many layers of bureaucracy to cut through before anything happens as you thought you planned it would. The VW organisers had a gala dinner scheduled to take place on the beach by the official tournament hotel last Friday night. There were so many "officials" with jurisdiction over the proposed area for the spectacle who wanted their piece of the action that the organisers decided to abandon the beach and stage the event back in the hotel.

There are layers to unravel when it comes to getting to the bottom of any deal in China according to those who are permanently trying to unravel these hidden seams.

What appeared like a rent-a-crowd showed up for the back nine last Saturday and Sunday to witness my boss, Goosen, win the VW Masters. They were heavily armed with umbrellas, to shelter them from the strong sun, and cameras or phone cameras. They were bussed in from a local university and were very much a hindrance to the gathering of no more than 50 that had followed us for the front nine.

Their umbrellas were hard to see over, their cameras impossible to stop clicking. When asked to stop they gesticulated at forgiveness but kept on clicking.

When they ask for permission first and then forgiveness, I suppose China will truly have arrived as a golfing nation.