Ryan Pyle Blog: The China Fix

Hello,

Every now and then you read something that completely captures the moment. It's not just a case of great journalism but also a case of vast experience, knowledge and the canny ability to step back from a situation and see it clearly and objectively. Below is just such a piece of writing.

The timing is important because Google have called out China and support from other tech companies is thin. Few are willing to stand up against what many consider a harder stance and more threatening business environment in China. James writes with an openness, an honesty and with two decades of China business experience. Please read below:

Online LINK: The China Fix

Copywrite: James McGregor
____________________________________
Monday, Feb. 01, 2010
The China Fix
By James McGregor

In my more than two decades in China, I have seldom seen the foreign business community more angry and disillusioned than it is today. Such sentiment goes beyond the Internet censorship and cyberspying that led to Google's Jan. 12 threat to bail out of China, or the clash of values (freedom vs. control) implied by the Google case. It is about the perception that antiforeign attitudes and policies in China have been growing and hardening since the global economic crisis pushed the U.S. and Europe into a tailspin and launched China to its very uncomfortable stardom on the world stage. (Read "Google Ends Policy of Self-Censorship in China.")

Visiting CEOs' banquet-table chatter is now dominated by swapping tales of arrogant and insolent Chinese bureaucrats and business partners. The litany includes purposefully inconsistent and nontransparent enforcement of regulations, rampant intellectual-property theft, state penetration of multinationals through union and Communist Party organizations, blatant market impediments through rigged product standards and testing, politicized courts and agencies that almost always favor local companies, creative and selective enforcement of WTO requirements ... The list goes on. (See "Google Earth Adds Historical Photos.")

The foreign business community in China has deep respect and affection for the Chinese people and their hard-earned success. But more than a few foreign business leaders are asking themselves if they have been bamboozled by the system. Multinationals have been solid citizens in China, handing over heaps of capital, technology, training, source code, best practices and proprietary products to joint-venture partners they were forced into bed with. They have funded schools, orphanages, disaster reconstruction, overseas scholarships and all manner of poverty-alleviation programs. But now that the China market matters more to them, it appears that China couldn't care less. Increasingly difficult China-market access is the immediate worry. But many are looking ahead and losing sleep over expectations that their onetime partners are morphing into predators — and that their own technology and know-how will be coming back at them globally in the form of cut-price products from subsidized state-owned behemoths.

At the same time, I have also seldom seen the Chinese government and business community more unsettled and uncertain. Theirs is an arrogance borne of insecurity. The global financial chaos and China's rocketing global status threw off the meticulous national development schedules carefully crafted by the risk-averse and surprise-allergic engineers who run the Party. (See the top 10 Google Earth finds.)

The pressures on Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are overwhelming. They are white-knuckling their way through their final two years in office, focusing on 8% or higher growth and crushing any dissent that could derail it. The Chinese people are generally pretty happy, but the Party leadership is terrified of their outsized expectations. People under age 40, the progeny of the one-child policy, didn't live through Maoist poverty and upheaval. They are pampered, impatient and demanding. They consider exponential growth as a basic benchmark of life, and access to information to be a civil right. China's rich are powerful opponents of further reform and opening. They made money the local way and are determined to block foreign competition so this can continue.

In their spare time, China's leaders are reaching under the carpet to tackle the country's endemic corruption, epidemic pollution, emaciated health care, shredded social services, entrenched industrial overcapacity and swiftly aging population, to name a few. They have little remaining bandwidth, and no experience or desire to be the visionary and magnanimous world leaders who can look beyond China's own often desperate needs that the world wants them to be.

So both Chinese and non-Chinese have legitimate challenges and understandable phobias. Google is just a proxy in this intensifying dispute. It's really about rebalancing the economic and political dynamic between China and the developed world, with the U.S. as the key negotiator for the West. It won't be easy. China and the U.S. are past masters at blaming their domestic policy failings on outsiders. Finger-pointing politicians and chest-beating nationalists in the two nations will make rational discussion nearly impossible. Yet it is time for leaders on both sides of the Pacific to lift their heads above overwhelming domestic concerns and fix China's deteriorating relationship with foreign business and the developed world before things get out of control. One thing's certain: they won't find the answers through Google.

**McGregor, a senior counselor for APCO Worldwide, is a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and author of One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China
____________________________________

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Blogging in 2009

Hello.

This is another one of those boring blogs that looks back at 2009. This time we are looking at my blogging.

To be honest I've been blogging since 2006. But I would have to say that in 2009 I finally got my feet moving and began blogging on a regular basis. I had a total of 102 blogs in 2009. That is a vast improvement over 2008 (22 blogs), 2007 (14 blogs) and 2006 (13 blogs).

So I'm blogging, most of it is rubbish but I hope there are a few entertaining gems in there somewhere. Needless to say 102 blogs in one year is a pretty aggressive number for a single blogger who tries to focus on original content. Many of my blogs are short and introduce new work, and when feeling motivated I try to branch out and write something longer and more opinionated.

My goal is that 2010 will bring a similar number of blogs to the viewing public. I seem to have settled in to a nice routine of 1 or 2 blogs a week, focusing more on quality than quantity. Fingers crossed it all comes together nicely. I appreciate that there is at least some people who enjoy the regular read, and your emails and feedback are very much welcomed. Please continue to write and I'll try to reply to everyone on questions regarding photography and China in general.

Keep reading, and tell all your friends.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Newsweek "Year in Images"

Hello.

I'm very honored to have been included in 2009's edition of Newsweek's "The Year in Images" issue. It's always nice to have your work recognized and it's even nicer to have one of your images published as a defining image of the year. I'm very proud to have a strong relationship with Newsweek. They've been very supportive of my work in China and I've throughly enjoyed my collaboration with their editors on every occasion.

The image chosen, see above, was of the BaLing Bridge. The bridge is a massive suspension bridge in rural China that is set to help connect the Southwestern cities of Guiyang and Kunming, two relative backwaters that could very well be at the forefront of China's next round of powerful economic growth.

The image was used, by Newsweek, as an example of China's stimulus package of USD 585 billion - which mainly went to infrastructure projects like this one. While the bridge was obviously planned, and construction had begun, well before the financial crisis it is nonetheless a symbol of China's commitment to connecting the countryside with the wealth and business opportunities enjoyed in coastal cities and provinces.

I'm not an economist, but I guess if China keeps spending on infrastructure and helping more businesses tap cheap land and labor further inland even more rural residents will be lifted from poverty and China's industrial revolution could very well continue for another decade or more. Fingers crossed these infrastructure projects get used and help deliver real progress and improvement in people's lives. China doesn't have much more room for anymore "white elephants".

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: BBC News / 20 Years in Pictures

Hello.

How vain are you? How often to do you "Google" your name? Honestly?

Sadly, I do it often. My reasoning might surprise you. I don't get any emotional boost from seeing how many google pages my name appears in; but I've found it an excellent way to see how my work is being used online. So each month I spend a bit of time, less than an hour, trolling through websites in which my name or pictures appear.

Often I am pleasantly surprised. For example Corbis put together a 12 picture slide show of the most commanding news photographs from the last 20 years in September 2009. The BBC News website ran the slide show and I'm very honored that one of my images from the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008 was included. Sadly I only figured it out by doing a Google search for my name in late December.

BBC News 20 Years of Photographs

The image include, see above, is of a woman who had lost her son in the collapse of a Middle School in Juyuan, Sichuan; about an hours drive from the provincial capital city of Chengdu. That shot was one of the toughest I've ever taken. The woman was hysterical and the moment was emotional. Some have said that images like this one are a gross violation of privacy, but I feel my images, and others like it, are an important documentation of history. The Chinese government has never fully answered questions about why schools collapsed in such great numbers. Families have been torn apart from shoddy construction, and sadly there is no one honest enough to take the blame or even admit that corruption in the construction of these schools was widely to blame. I was there, I was able to bend rebar (the steel wires that hold concrete in place) with my bare hands; clearly no match for a strong earthquake.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: 2009 Travel Days

Hello.

I like to look back. I like to reflect, and then I like to learn, and move forwards. So over the next few weeks you might see a few blogs in which I reflect back on the difficult and exciting year of 2009. The first blog in this series deals with Travel Days.

I'm a bit of a loser, if that seems harsh then a geek at the very least. I like to keep track of my travel days each year. And 2009 was a monster of a year for travel; at least a monster by my standards. Let's look at the stats.

There were 365 days in 2009. And of those there were roughly 260 work days, meaning generally Monday to Friday, excluding holidays.

Somehow, I logged 141 nights in hotels or around 141 travel days and some 70 plane flights.

Now it would be wrong to assume that all of this was work where I traveled to a location and too pictures, but I can tell you that more than 80% of exactly that.

Work, and rest, took me to cities as diverse as: Shenzhen, Kashgar, Shaoxing, Hong Kong, Toronto, Changsha, Tianjin, Urumqi, Milan, Paris, Dongguan, Chengdu, Xi'an, Beijing, Halifax, New York, Guiyang, London, Taiyuan, Pingyao, Haikou, Sanya, Korle, Lhasa and finally Singapore.

That's a serious bit of travel. I didn't keep statistics for 2008 but I'll be sure to keep my numbers for 2010. Should be an interesting comparison.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Internet Porn Crackdown

Hello.

China continues to wage war against the internet. Recent reports indicated that some 5,394 people have been arrested in an Internet Porn Crackdown. This latest round of arrests is, apparently, an effort to protect the emotional health of children.

I find this strange given the fact that I can walk about 20 meters from my house (in a nice part of town) and find a massage parlor offering prostitution, and 90% of the hotels I stay in when I travel in China pester me with phone calls at 10pm asking me if I'd like some sex for the evening. With AIDs running rampant and the divorce rate well above 50%, I'm glad the government focusing on internet porn. God knows it would be embarrassing if someone wrote an article claiming that prostitution is the largest profession amongst Chinese women.

In any event, the 5,394 arrests represents a 400% increase over the number of arrests in 2008. Clearly a message by the ever-powerful to play by the rules. And what are the rules? Well, that's a good question. Seems that a whole bunch of bloggers got caught up in the mix and porn is becoming a scapegoat for arresting anyone doing anything the government doesn't like online; like blogging about politics for example.

Maybe I'll get arrested for distributing internet porn over my blog, but instead of actual porn it'll just be pictures of young Chinese males (fully clothed) using computers, see above, and some highly opinionated text.

As China is set to become the world's largest economy sometime in the next 20 years, somewhere, somehow the world has to ask itself; are we really prepared to play by China's rules when they start dictating global policy? China's war on the internet is already going global as China as demanded that all international and domestic websites that wish to be viewed in China must register first with the Propaganda department, or else risk being blocked. Upwards and onwards.

I've got a front row seat to China's war on the internet. Exciting times.
____________________________________________
Copywrite: Reuters: LINK: CLICK HERE

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police arrested thousands in a drive against Internet pornography throughout 2009, officials said, vowing a deepening crackdown that critics say is being used to tighten overall censorship.

The Chinese government has run a highly publicised campaign against what officials said were banned smutty and lewd pictures overwhelming the country's Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.

Chinese police said late on Thursday the crackdown on Internet pornography had brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009 -- a fourfold increase in the number of such cases compared with 2008.

The announcement on the Ministry of Public Security's website (www.mps.gov.cn) said the drive would deepen in 2010.

Police would "intensify punishments for Internet operations that violate laws and regulations", said the statement from the ministry's Internet security section.

"Strengthen monitoring of information," it urged, "Press Internet service providers to put in place preventive technology."

With an estimated 360 million Internet users, China has a bigger online population than any other country. But the ruling Communist Party worries the Internet could become a dangerous conduit for threatening images and ideas.

The ministry did not say how many of the 5,394 suspects arrested were later charged, released or prosecuted.

The anti-pornography drive has also netted many sites with politically sensitive or even simply user-generated content, in what some see as an effort by the government to reassert control over new media.

China has banned a number of popular websites and Internet services, including Google's Youtube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, as well as Chinese content sharing sites.
____________________________________________

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: New Work – Golf on Hainan Island

Hello,

I recently completed a story for the Financial Times Magazine on a secretive golf course on China’s Hainan Island. The island is developing at hyper speed and government officials are touting the island as a future competitor to Hawaii. Five star hotels and international quality golf courses can be found just about everywhere on Hainan Island.

Dan Washburn wrote a wonderful story and he has been knee deep in golf stories over the last few years. He is even preparing a book on golf and golf development in China. Follow the link below for the story.

FT LINK: Click Here

Article Below:
________________________________
Copywrite: Dan Washburn

Golf’s secret boom in Hainan, China
By Dan Washburn

If you are flying into Haikou from the west, you can see it. Sit on the right-hand side of the aircraft and look out of your window. It’s there. Viewed from above, this vast swathe of land may not look like much – fuzzy green vegetation, shadowy pockets of volcanic rock, incongruous veins of reddish brown soil – but in a couple of years it will make history. Locals refer to this area by its code name: Project 791. Soon, most people will know it as Mission Hills Hainan, the largest collection of golf courses in the world.

The scope of the multi-billion-dollar project is staggering. It occupies 80sq km of forest and shrubland – an area the size of Hong Kong island – in north-east Hainan, the island province long touted as China’s answer to Hawaii. Once completed, it will feature 22 golf courses, at a stroke doubling the number on Hainan today. It’s been in the works since 2006 and for more than two years, thousands of workers have been clearing trees, moving soil, building greens, fairways, clubhouses and luxury hotels.

And yet aspects of the project remain as mysterious as the island on which it sits. In fact, the man most closely connected to the Mission Hills venture in Hainan denies its very existence.

When I first met Ken Chu, vice-chairman of Mission Hills Group and one of the most powerful men in China’s burgeoning golf industry, I was wearing yellow plastic bags over my shoes. Our interview was to take place in an $11m villa, one of the many that line the fairways at Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen, the Chinese business hub north of Hong Kong. I was told that everyone who entered the show home must don the protective shoe coverings. Shuffling past a white grand piano I took a seat in a living room whose styling might best be described as neo-Liberace. When Chu arrived, the first thing I noticed was his shoes – stylish, black, leather and uncovered. I stood up to greet the 35-year-old mogul and cheap plastic crackled beneath my feet.

For now, Mission Hills Shenzhen touts itself as the “World’s No. 1”, and Guinness World Records plays along, labelling the 20sq km, 12-course golf club the largest on the planet, even though Nanshan International Golf Club in north-eastern China has 63 more holes. Opened in 1994 by Chu’s billionaire father, Hong Kong businessman David Chu, this is golf on steroids. Each of the 12 courses was designed by one of the biggest names in the sport, from Faldo to Nicklaus to Norman. Mission Hills Shenzhen also features the world’s largest clubhouse, Asia’s largest spa and, for good measure, the continent’s largest tennis centre.

Towards the end of our meeting, I brought up Hainan. I asked Chu how many courses Mission Hills had planned there. It was the first time I saw him flustered. “We, um, it’s not so much on the course development,” he stumbled. “Actually, we haven’t even started. We haven’t even talked about this project. It’s something in the pipeline, in discussion, but it’s not purely on golf. It’s a tourist destination.”

“So, it’s just too early to say anything?” I asked. “Maybe at this stage,” Chu said, “because there’s nothing to talk about.”

This was in July last year. When I travelled to Hainan in August, I discovered that not only was there something worth talking about, but a large part of the project was nearing completion. Six golf courses had been shaped and seeded. Three more – including the showpiece “tournament course” – were even further along. They looked perfectly playable, lush and green, with local women in rattan hats the shape of Tiffany lampshades putting the finishing touches to the white-sand bunkers.

The tournament course is stunning. With its irregular lines and eroded sand traps, it manages to appear rugged and natural, even though there is little natural about it. Incorporated into the design are old, overgrown lava-rock walls and archways left over from the land’s previous occupants, along with some mature lychee, ficus and acacia trees that managed to elude the clear-cutter. The result is a landscape that looks like it has been there for decades, maybe centuries, not months. A drive along the cart path, made from crushed lava rock, has the flavour of a Jurassic safari – that is, until you see the massive hotel and clubhouse looming on the horizon.

It is all remarkably telegenic, and by design. The talk is that in 2011 the Mission Hills Hainan tournament course will become the new location for either golf’s Omega-sponsored World Cup, currently a fixture at Mission Hills Shenzhen, or of the HSBC Champions, the tournament dubbed “Asia’s Major”. That event, with $7m in prize money, draws some of the biggest names in the sport and has been held in Shanghai since its launch in 2005. Professional Golf Association representatives, I was told, have toured Mission Hills Hainan. And Ken Chu flies in every two weeks to monitor progress on the project.

The moans of bullfrogs emanating from the marshland along the 18th fairway are replaced by the ping ping of hammers hitting metal. Chain-smoking labourers, skin brown and weathered by the tropical sun, plug away at the two dramatic structures that form the backdrop to the course’s closing hole. Fashioned in Mediterranean Revival style, they are white with red and black tile roofs.

In reality, this will be the world’s only self-contained golf city. Its 22 courses will cover every style imaginable – from links to desert to Augusta-like perfection – and include some decidedly non-traditional designs. Picture yourself playing into a waterfall, through a cave, around a volcano, or over a replica of the Great Wall. There will be multiple town centres with luxury homes and apartments, hotels and spas, shopping malls and streets lined with restaurants and bars. The Chus are turning countryside into suburbia, no doubt raising surrounding property values and creating thousands of jobs along the way.

But why the reticence when I inquired about the Hainan development? Why does a golf project require a code name? There is a one-word answer to such questions: China. The country’s latest moratorium on golf course construction was brought in more than five years ago, and is still technically in place. In China, golf remains a prohibitively expensive, elitist pursuit – inescapably linked to corruption in the minds of many – and, some believe, its expansion runs counter to several of President Hu Jintao’s primary concerns: among them the environment, the plight of farmers and the widening gap between rich and poor. A project that absorbs 20 million acres of open land and directly affects the lives of tens of thousands of poor rural families is bound to create controversy. For Mission Hills, for now, the less fanfare the better.

Given all that, how could such an audacious project get the go-ahead? Why would someone even consider trying to open a golf club nearly one-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan? And how could construction go virtually unnoticed and unreported for more than a year? There’s an answer to these questions, too, and it is also China. In the years since the government announced its supposed golf course moratorium, the number of courses has nearly trebled to an estimated 600 or so. In China, there is always a way.

And that is especially true in Hainan, where golf is now viewed as a vital part of the province’s development. When modern China’s first golf course opened in 1984, Hainan was four years away from becoming a fully-fledged province, and most mainland Chinese still regarded it with equal parts curiosity and fear. Despite its proximity to the mainland – Haikou, Hainan’s capital, lies just 30km from the southern tip of Guangdong province – for centuries it had been characterised as a typhoon-prone outpost inhabited by mysterious natives, ruthless pirates, banished criminals and exiled officials. Indeed, prior to his expulsion to Hainan in 848, disgraced Tang Dynasty chief minister Li Deyu famously wrote that he was being sent to the “gate of hell”.

The reputation stuck. One Hainan local said that when he arrived on the mainland in the 1980s to attend university, his fellow students were surprised to discover he didn’t have a tail. But it was also during this decade of reform that top-ranking officials began referring to Hainan as China’s “treasure island”, both for its rich natural resources and its sun-blessed, palm-lined beaches. Though poor, backward and corrupt, Hainan had potential, but it seemed no one could agree for what.

As China’s middle class continued to grow, its appeal as a tourist destination came to the fore. And last year, after decades of false starts, the provincial government announced plans to make tourism the “pillar” of the local economy, to rival destinations such as Phuket and Bali. Golf, once banned by the communists as bourgeois, is expected to play a big role in this repositioning. At last count, Hainan – slightly bigger than Belgium – had 22 courses, although many people believe it could easily reach 100 within five years.

While a negligible percentage of the population plays golf, China is one of the few places in the world where golf course construction is booming. “Everyone who is even thinking about golf course design is here in China,” said Haikou-based Richard Mon, vice-president of China operations for Schmidt-Curley Golf Design, the US company behind all 34 of Mission Hills’ China courses. “If you’re not, you don’t have any work. Everywhere else in the world is done.” Golf in modern China is in its infancy – the game here is still four years younger than Sergio Garcia – and the speed of its growth will no doubt be accelerated by its inclusion in the 2016 Olympics, a move that should give the sport some legitimacy in the eyes of the once-sceptical Chinese government.

What’s less certain, though, is whether the provision of 100 golf courses – let alone the 200 to 300 touted by one provincial official – makes sense on Hainan, an island with 8.5 million predominately rural inhabitants, only about 3,000 of whom play. While most Hainan courses are fully booked during the winter peak tourist season, the insufferable heat and relentless rains of summer keep away all but the most dedicated or frugal (greens fees are often heavily discounted during the quiet months). The struggling global economy has also taken a toll on business.

But such quibbles may be missing the larger truth about golf course development in Hainan, and throughout much of China: the number of golf courses built has very little to do with the number of golfers available to play on them. With few exceptions, golf courses exist to help sell luxury villas. Developers do not worry if a course sits empty, as long as the properties around it sell. And so far in Hainan, selling homes has not been a problem. Wealthy bosses from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and central China’s coal belt fly in and buy up the villas, sometimes several at a time, often paying in cash. In China, to own a home on a golf course does not necessarily mean you play the game. It’s more about prestige. Golf, like luxury sedans and handbags, is just another way to project your wealth.

During the planning and proposal stage, however, golf is rarely mentioned. That is how developers get around the supposed national moratorium on building courses. “No one calls it a golf course now,” one industry insider told me. “Instead, it’s a green space or it’s equestrian or it’s an exercise field. They are creative. But the government knows. It’s just all about loopholes.”

For example, in 2008 the China Youth Daily reported that the word “golf” does not appear in Mission Hills’ agreement with the local government to develop in Hainan. According to the newspaper, the document describes a “land consolidation” project that will “improve the production and living standards of the local farmers and promote the building of a new socialist countryside”.

Hainan bills itself as China’s greenest province, and in many ways it is the tropical paradise it is touted to be, a literal breath of fresh air for those travelling in from the mainland. But the past several decades of property development and slash-and-burn agriculture have taken their toll on the island’s ecology. Like many current golf projects on Hainan, the Mission Hills development primarily occupies acreage that the government has classified as huangdi, or “wasteland”. But this only means that the land was either never used by man or is no longer used by man. It doesn’t take into account its ecological merits. “If they only build on true wasteland, then there is no problem,” said one conservationist active in Hainan. “To me, the [Mission Hills] area next to Haikou is not a wasteland. In Hong Kong, that would be a country park, a very nice forest or wilderness park.”

This northern section of the Mission Hills land is less than 30 minutes by car from downtown Haikou and just east of a 108sq km national geological park built around the crater of an extinct volcano. Both properties occupy a region long known as the “lung of Haikou” for its green landscape and fresh air. Nearly three years ago, a Haikou-based pressure group believed it had secured around 825 acres of this land to establish a forest park that would help promote environmental awareness. Its members worked on the project for two years, winning the support of the government, attracting investors and brokering a land deal with local villagers. But suddenly in 2007, the villagers ended talks. And that is when the group’s organisers first heard about Project 791.

“They didn’t even notify us,” a member of the group told me over a pot of Pu’er tea. “The government just told the villagers not to work with us any more. All the years working, the money, the energy, all wasted. It was a devastating hit. It broke our hearts, and we felt so small and insignificant. We knew we could never defeat them. How can you go against the government?” The group was warned not to do anything that might disrupt the Mission Hills project. In Hainan, a domestic non-governmental organisation is never truly non-governmental. A good relationship with the authorities is necessary for survival, and going up against golf, an industry thought to be lining the pockets of many a government official, would not be a wise move. At the Mission Hills site, one completed fairway has already been dubbed the “government hole” due to its popularity with local officials.

The lobby group member did not attempt to hide his frustration. “They call this ecological restoration?” he asked incredulously. “Sure, they might plant a few trees – but they also destroyed a mountain and turned it into a lake.” Ah yes, the mountain. It’s true that while certain species of tree and shrub thrive on this volcanic landscape, the rocky earth is not suitable for most forms of farming. It is also not suitable for building and shaping golf courses, which require a couple of metres of topsoil. The solution? Mission Hills bought a “mountain” several kilometres from the construction site and started digging – until the mountain was a hole in the ground. A wagon train of trucks carted the red earth to the construction site, where it is stored in a huge flat pile that looks like an Arizona plateau.

Like environmental protection, land ownership in rural Hainan is a particularly murky issue. Last year, in a town called Longqiao, villagers protested after discovering the great disparity between what Mission Hills had paid the local government for their land and the amount passed on to them. Some demonstrators flipped a government car, and military police were called in to disperse the crowd. Such public expressions of displeasure are often the only recourse for disgruntled villagers, who usually have no official documents to back up their claim to a piece of land. All they can do is yell – or congregate on fairways brandishing their sickles.

Villagers, told that developers are merely renting their land for 50 years, see through the ruse and view this as their only opportunity to cash in. It happens throughout Hainan. At one course site I visited, locals had hastily built new homes in the construction zone in an effort to claim larger payouts. At another site, where villagers were being compensated for each grave that had to be moved, fresh ones began appearing every morning. Construction on the Mission Hills project was halted for several months in 2008 due to land disputes, and various dust-ups have caused the site’s boundaries to change more than a hundred times since the planning process began.

I spent two days hiking through villages around the Mission Hills site, trying to gauge the mood of the locals, who by and large were warm and friendly, quick to invite a stranger indoors or under a shady tree for a cup of tea or a piece of jackfruit. Most lived in hamlets laid out in maze-like fashion, with narrow stone paths weaving between single-storey, centuries-old homes, with walls of irregularly shaped pieces of lava rock and tiled roofs. More and more villagers are doing away with these old buildings, however, opting instead to use the money they have made by selling land to Mission Hills to build larger, multi-storey homes out of brick or cinder block.

Near the perimeter of the golf site, I met Ma Jiguang, who two days earlier had opened a small shop a hundred yards from where labourers were building high-rise dormitories that would eventually house thousands of Mission Hills employees. Behind his one-room cement structure, the 37-year-old Ma had built a brick wall to mark where he felt his property ended and Mission Hills began. Other than his home back in the village, this was the only piece of land he had left.

“We had fruit trees, so I didn’t want to sell,” Ma said, as weary-looking workers wandered into his shop in search of cold water and beer. “But they had already claimed it and measured it. What could I do? The government tells you the price and no matter if you are willing to sell or not, they take your land anyway. As an ordinary citizen, how can you fight the government officials?”

Ma, like many I spoke to, said that despite the area’s designation as wasteland, the nutrient-rich volcanic soil was ideal for cultivating fruit trees. The region’s lychees were particularly famous and could fetch a good price at market. In all, Ma gave up 10 mu (a Chinese unit of measurement equal to roughly one-sixth of an acre) to the Mission Hills project and the government paid him around RMB200,000 (£18,000), a very large sum for the average Chinese farmer. But Ma knew that his land was worth more – Mission Hills, he claimed, paid the government five times what he had received for it – and he wasn’t sure how he’d earn a living in the future without his orchard. Although some villagers were happy to sell because their land was rocky, Ma told me of one of his friends who had protested and refused. The next day, he claimed, soldiers had arrived at his friend’s property and bulldozed his trees.

A car pulled up on the dirt patch in front of Ma’s store. In walked a man in white shorts, a white golf shirt and flip-flops. It was Ma’s cousin, Li Guanghua, a town-level government official. He assured me that Mission Hills Hainan was going to be bigger and better than the one in Shenzhen. “I have been to the Mission Hills in Shenzhen,” Li announced proudly. He and about 100 other town and village representatives had travelled there on a week-long expenses-paid trip before the land deals had been finalised.

“Do you want to have a look inside?” Li asked, gesturing towards the Mission Hills property. “I’d love to,” I said. “But will we be able to get past security? I hear it’s pretty tight.” Li looked insulted. “Who can stop me?” he scoffed. “Who can stop the government’s car?”

Alice Liu contributed to this story. Some names have been changed to protect identities. Dan Washburn is a Shanghai-based writer.
________________________________

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: The Rebuilding of Kashgar

Hello.

Happy New Year folks. I recently wrote a small story for the Digital Journalist. The un-edited text is below. The link to the Digital Journalist feature can be found by clicking the link at the bottom.
________________________________________
The Rebuilding of Kashgar
By: Ryan Pyle

As a photographer, and a visually sensitive human being, I find it difficult to watch historic architecture of Kashgar, China vanish before my eyes. And this essentially means that all my visits to photograph this ancient oasis town are simultaneously incredibly pleasing and excruciatingly painful. Each time I return something is missing: a market, a pit full of blacksmiths, or a small local mosque. I have to some times force myself to remember to take pictures of everything I see, photojournalism aside, it is the architecture that is disappearing fastest. No other country in the world is knocking down old buildings faster to make way for new hotels, highways and airports than China. In a few more years and there might not be anything unique or original left at all; the whole country, from Beijing to Kashgar, is starting to look the same. I feel my photographs of Kashgar, and the rest of the region of Xinjiang, are providing a historical record of what once was; the homes an laneways as they were intended to be. The entire scenario is a pity really, the cultural and architectural diversity being lost, even if re-built to look somewhat similar, is not something that can be faked, or easily brought back.

China’s contributions to Silk Road trade, the route of trade spanning from the Far East to the Mediterranean Sea that brought both silks, tea, knowledge, and even religion across continents, is storied and well documented. Of all the beautiful towns and villages that one can find along this route, none may be as written about or as often discussed as Kashgar. Situated just a few hundred kilometers from the border of Pakistan and China, in the furthest western corner of China, this Silk Road mainstay has always been at a crossroads between cultures and time. For centuries criminals, holy men, and traders tramped across the region; and it was out of this tradition that the Silk Road, and the mystic of Kashgar, was established.

Much of this mystic, and excellent documentation by travel writers for almost a century and a half, is why the international community has been crying foul since May 2009, when it became apparent that the local city government of Kashgar had acted on plans to tear down much of city’s historic old quarter.
Local officials from the city government, always uncomfortable with direct questions, cited a danger from earthquakes and indicated that Kashgar’s historic old town – which contains mainly earthen homes, some hundreds of years old – must be razed in the name of public safety. Replacing the earthen homes will be similar style brick and steel based structure, with a focus on a stronger foundation.

Since May many local Uygurs have had to up and move out of their homes, some 13,000 families live in Kashgars “maze-like alleyways” of the old quarter, and more questions surfaced about when the local inhabitants would be allowed to move back in to their newly rebuilt, and stronger, homes. Rumors swirled of a possible land grab by the Kashgar government, forcing Uygurs to move out of their old earthen homes to temporary housing on the outskirts of town and then not allowing them to move back. But that appears not to be the case. The Kashgar government may indeed have safety on their mind. As entire families have moved out of center of Kashgar, the wrecking ball has done much damage, but new homes are beginning to be re-built under the watchful eyes of homeowners.

But not all is well. The money offered up by the government to relocated temporarily was barely adequate, but the government has mainly held up it’s share of the bargain; covering the costs of the bricks and steel rebar for the rebuilding of the foundation as well as the outer walls and roofs of the new homes, while home owners are responsible for interior decorations. Many home owners that I spoke with on a recent trip suggested that they were pleased with the outcome, but that there had been delays and they were told they would be in their new homes before winter, but now it looks like spring at the earliest.

While new bricks and steel rebar would make up the guts of the new foundation, many home owners are still planning on covering the exterior of their houses with similar earthen materials; so the “new” old quarter may yet have a similar feel that it did before the onslaught of bulldozers. The earthen, or mud brick, materials are essential for keeping the heat out in the summer and the cold out in the winter.

So, if little will actually change, and the old quarter of Kashgar will be rebuilt much the same, then why go through the entire process of destroying so many homes and relocating so many people? Could all of this been done in the name of economic stimulus?

It might be important to note that if a house is 300 years old, there is a very good chance that it is already earthquake proof. So there should be no need to tear it down and rebuild a stronger version. But the local government may have several motives at play; and first and foremost is that officials in Kashgar view the old laneways of the old quarter to be a haven of dissidents and terrorists. Rightly or wrongly, they have wanted to reorganize and re-account for everyone and everything in the old quarter for some time. Their opportunity came with the global financial crisis; when about USD 400 million was earmarked in the November 2008 stimulus package, a total of USD 585 billion, for the “earthquake proofing” of Kashgar; a very sly bit of pork barrel politics. That kind of money buys a lot of bricks, workers and bulldozers. It might even line a few pockets along the way as well. When in doubt, tear it down and build it up again.
________________________________________

Digital Journalist Story:
LINK: Rebuilding of Kashgar

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________