Golf, once frowned upon by China’s Communist Party, is now enjoyed by the country’s rich and powerful, and has grown in popularity in recent years. News comes from the China Daily newspaper that golf lessons are going to be made compulsory for some students at Xiamen University in Fujian province. The president of Xiamen University in south-east China was quoted as saying it would help produce “socially elite people with the best education”. Those majoring in management, law, economic and software engineering courses would “be required” to take the course, reports. One critic accused the university of “vulgar elitism.”
As a former prof in China and a regular writer on Chinese ed., I found this item highly relevant to a major change underway in the philosophy and style of ed. in that country. That a game with golf’s socio-cultural resonances should be allowed at all is significant, but making it mandatory to produce an upper class with western bourgeois trappings is really astonishing. It is typical of the Chinese both to think that merely by requiring students to play the game they can produce a western-style elite, ignoring the fact that in the west people freely choose to play it, and to condemn the requirement by the oxymoron “vulgar elitism,” which is of course what the Party has always been into. I would like the poster to send me the original article from whence this info. came. Thanks.