Thirty-seven cranes. That's what I saw when I parted the hotel-room curtains on my first morning in Beijing. And I'm not talking about the graceful, long-necked, pond-wading variety. No, these were the 200-tons-of-hydraulically-articulating-steel kind. One leaned straight at me from the 30th floor of a structure across the street. Three more bobbed up and down in the foundation of a building site two blocks away, while another sat incongruously in the center of a rush-hour traffic jam. Across the horizon, every point on the compass sported at least one specimen of China's new national bird.Eighty percent of the world's construction cranes are in Asia, and 80 percent of those are in China, the most populous nation and now the fastest growing economy in the world. Shanghai, which had just one skyscraper in 1985, now has more than 300 of them, while Beijing has no fewer than 7,000 buildings under construction, many of them rising at the rate of one floor per week.
As the People's Republic continues its remarkable transition from communism to capitalism, personal wealth is rising just as dramatically as the skylines. The average Chinese citizen enjoys 10 times the purchasing power of a quarter century ago, and the nation will soon have more than a million millionaires. The Chinese are the third largest consumers of luxury brands-from Rolls-Royce to Dom Perignon to Cartier-just behind the U.S. and Japan, but within five years they will be first.
Much of that spending will be on golf. A century after America became addicted to the game, the Middle Kingdom has caught the bug in a big way, as Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book" has fallen out of favor for Harvey Penick's.
In 1983 there were no golf courses in China. Now there are 310, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Some predictions call for as many as a thousand new courses in the next 10 years, a pace so alarmingly rapid that the government recently imposed a moratorium on construction, in the interest of protecting the nation's arable land. In modern China, however, where there's a will-accompanied by sufficient cash-there's a way, so the course boom has continued virtually unabated.
I wasn't sure what to expect. Word was that most of the early Chinese courses had been created hastily on shoestring budgets and were forgettable at best. On the other hand, China has attracted a few big-name designers-Trent Jones Jr., Nicklaus, Norman, etc.-and I was curious to see what they had produced.
