Learning to Ski in a Country of Beginners
As China prepares to host the Winter Olympics, its people get on skis.
Published: June 14, 2021
A trip to Wanlong resort reveals the reality behind the slogan “Three Hundred Million People Enter the Ice and Snow.” Illustration by Ping Zhu
For select Chinese skiers and snowboarders, there are WeChat groups whose names include the phrase Gan Dengyan: “Look on in Despair.” Despair is not open to everybody. In order to join, applicants submit their name, place of residence, and proper documentation in the form of an X-ray or other medical report. Despite the strict rules, a handful of interlopers have successfully penetrated Despair and returned with screenshots. In January, 2020, somebody called Ruirui recorded images from a WeChat group called Look on in Despair While Healing During the 2018-2020 Winter Season. Originally, this group had been dedicated to 2018-19, but the season of Despair was extended, because many people had yet to recover from their skiing injuries. Ruirui’s screenshots showed a total of three hundred and fifty-five members, including Feng Chao, Beijing, Torn Right Biceps; Dandan, Shanghai, Snapped Right Ankle Ligament; Zizizi, Beijing, Dislocated and Cracked Thoracic Vertebra; and Xiao Bai, Beijing, Too Many Injuries to Write.
Another person, named Dapeng, penetrated the same group and conducted a statistical analysis. He produced a two-thousand-character warning to the public at large, noting that, of the group’s injuries, twenty-seven per cent involved the lower limbs, twenty-two per cent were to upper limbs, and fourteen per cent were to the head and neck. Dapeng advised enthusiasts not to drink alcohol before skiing. He also offered a piece of advice that, to anybody who hasn’t made a pilgrimage to a Chinese ski mountain, sounds as cryptic as a Taoist maxim: “If you’re a novice, add a small turtle to prevent pain from falling on your butt.” In Dapeng’s opinion, the three main reasons for injuries are:
1. Bad psychological factors
2. Insufficient preparation
3. Excessive fatigue
When it comes to planning a ski vacation in China, the Internet is not a reassuring place. First, there are the slogans. In 2015, as part of Beijing’s bid—ultimately successful—to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, the government started a campaign to increase participation in winter sports. Officials adopted a Communist-style slogan that, though it had the benefit of being short, simple, and direct, was also White Walker-terrifying: “Three Hundred Million People Enter the Ice and Snow.”
Second, there are the reviews. In December, 2019, my wife, Leslie, started researching possible destinations for a ski trip with our twin daughters, and she couldn’t resist sending me some of the online comments she came across. As the only person in the household who had never skied, I knew that any vacation would require that I take lessons, at the age of fifty, from Chinese instructors.“There are truckloads of local tourists who come for a day of skiing,” one foreigner wrote on Tripadvisor, about a resort called Yabuli. “They are uninformed (some skied in dresses), have no idea about skiing, do not pay for instructors. They are plain dangerous.” Another review touched on lessons: “The instructors were very annoying, with one who kept hounding us to the point where we packed up our skis and went home, just to get him out of our faces.”
When the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of our holiday, I was not very disappointed. But the following year, with all the persistence of a Despair groupie, Leslie resumed her vacation planning. She settled on a resort called Wanlong, which means “Ten Thousand Dragons.” Wanlong is in Chongli, a district in Hebei Province which will host a number of events during the 2022 Olympics. Leslie emphasized that Wanlong’s reviews were generally positive. But positive isn’t always something that makes you feel better. “If you have an accident and maybe break your right arm snowboarding, then I can tell you that you will be well taken care of,” one woman gushed (five stars!) on the Tripadvisor page for Wanlong. “I was in good hands at the hospital in Chongli, because they mainly deal with injuries from skiing.”
We scheduled our trip for mid-February, during the traditional Spring Festival holiday, when the Chinese Olympic Committee was also planning to hold a dress rehearsal for many events. The International Olympic Committee had made few public comments about the human-rights issues that loomed over the Games, although pressure to do so had been building. In early February, more than a hundred and eighty human-rights groups called for a boycott, citing the mass-internment camps in Xinjiang and the erosion of political freedoms in Hong Kong and Tibet.
There were also questions related to the pandemic. Since the end of March, 2020, very few foreign-passport holders have been allowed to enter China, and it’s unclear how this policy will be adjusted for the Olympics. Last summer and fall, China controlled the virus to the point where most cities experienced no community spread of covid-19. But at the end of the year there were a few scattered outbreaks, and, in response, the government instructed many state employees not to travel during the Spring Festival, and some hotels required guests to show evidence of a negative covid test.
The day before our departure, we all got swabbed. Government hospitals had instituted special holiday covid rates—our local clinic charged us less than three dollars a test. We had decided to drive, in order to avoid hassles at airports and train stations. From Chengdu, the southwestern city where we live, it was more than thirteen hundred miles to Wanlong, in northern China. That kind of distance had been mentioned in one of the reviews that Leslie forwarded: “If you flew ten hours and took a train for three hours to get here just to ski, then you are an idiot.”
There are more than a dozen reasons that I had never tried skiing before I reached middle age. I grew up in mid-Missouri, where a popular poster featured the words “Ski Missouri” with a black-and-white photograph of a man in overalls, crouched over his skis, next to three mules in a muddy pasture. In addition, I had always recognized myself as a prime candidate for Looking on in Despair. My first job in journalism, a six-year posting as a paperboy for the Columbia Missourian, ended before dawn one morning in 1984, when I wiped out on my bike and suffered spiral fractures of my left tibia and fibula. In 2006, while reporting a story about the Great Wall for this magazine, I tripped over my subject and broke my left kneecap. In 2014, in Cairo, I snapped two bones in my right foot while running away from a demonstration that I was supposed to be covering. This makes me one of the few heroes in the industry with a history of work-related fractures that spans three continents and four decades.
Wait, there’s more. Broken jaw, 1977; compound fractures of the ulna and the radius, 1982; broken nose, 1997; fracture of the scaphoid, 2004. Some fingers, some toes. Why does this keep happening? All told, it’s fourteen broken bones, and an unflinching assessment determines the top three causes to be:
1. Other people’s mistakes
2. Bad infrastructure
3. Equipment failure
In 2007, after more than a decade in China, Leslie and I moved to a small town in Colorado, less than an hour from Telluride. But living near a resort is actually a good way to avoid skiing. There was no reason ever to take a family ski vacation: every Friday in January, the local public school packed up all the students in the third grade and older, handed out lift tickets that were heavily subsidized or free, and hauled the kids to Telluride for a day. On Saturdays, I stayed home and fed the woodstove while Leslie took the girls to an intensive children’s ski program.
Our return to China, though, exposed the family imbalances. I was the only person who couldn’t ski, but also the only one licensed to drive in the People’s Republic. In mid-February, there weren’t many others on the road; at the Yongchang International Hotel, in the northern city of Yulin, we were the sole diners in a cavernous banquet hall with thirty-five tables. A receptionist told me that, of three hundred and forty-one rooms, thirty were occupied. Staff at the hotel had carefully cut soap boxes in half, to function as little holders for cotton swabs, and taped the boxes in the elevators, so that guests wouldn’t have to touch the buttons. During the three days that we travelled, one new symptomatic covid infection was reported in all of China.
On the final day, we drove across a long, barren stretch of Inner Mongolia. The previous year, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the region had planned to host China’s National Winter Games. But the games were postponed because of the pandemic, and now, a year later, gift shops at the highway rest stops were trying to unload products branded “Inner Mongolia 2020.” Inner Mongolia 2020 pens sold for ten yuan, cell-phone covers for thirty-eight, and flash drives for a hundred and twenty-nine. Everything featured two smiling cartoon figures, Sainu and Anda, wearing traditional Mongol dress—mascots for an event that had never happened.
“I packed only the essentials.” Cartoon by Amy Hwang
We reached Chongli’s town center after dark, as snow flurries began to fall. By Chinese standards, the place was small—thirty thousand residents—and in the past it had been the district seat of a poor agricultural region. But now there was construction everywhere, and the town square featured a huge silver statue of a snowboarder. We drove past rental places named Crazy Skier, Brothers Ski Club, and Happy Journey Bear Ski Shop. Leslie made sure to point out the large illuminated sign in front of the brand-new branch of Peking University Third Hospital: “Sports Medicine.” All around town were posters with Olympic slogans, some in slightly off-kilter English:
To Prepare and Host the Winter Olympics in a Green, Sharing, Open, and Clean-Fingered Manner.
In Colorado and other parts of the American West, ski towns have a standard genesis story. Usually, there’s a connection with some mines that went bust, and often a charismatic individual envisions a future in skiing and tourism. Over time, the narrative changes to a tale of excess. Real-estate prices become obscene; boutiques sell things that nobody needs.
Chongli’s early development included these basic elements: the mines, the charismatic tycoon, the sudden influx of capital. But, as with many Chinese versions of things that are familiar in the West, the details seem to have been scrambled and redefined. It’s like reading a translation in which the meaning of each word has been shifted ever so slightly, until, in the end, it tells a different story.
In southwestern Sichuan Province, there’s a remote place called Shimian Xian: literally, Asbestos County. During the nineteen-sixties and seventies, four brothers named Luo grew up in Asbestos, where their parents, like many residents, worked for the state-run asbestos mine. Their father oversaw mechanical repairs; their mother served as a clerk in the statistics department. By the time the Luo brothers were in their thirties, the industry had been shut down. But the government never changed the county name—even now, more than a hundred thousand people live in Asbestos.
One day in the early nineties, Luo Hong, the youngest brother, preparing to celebrate his mother’s birthday, discovered that he couldn’t buy a proper cake in his underdeveloped town. In response, he decided to open a bakery. The business became successful, and he expanded to other cities. He partnered with the second-oldest brother, Luo Li, who had attended a vocational school in Gansu Province, a remote part of the northwest.
Eventually, all four Luo brothers were working for the business, which came to be called Holiland. In the beginning, Holiland targeted third- and fourth-tier cities in the west and the northeast. The timing was perfect: in the nineties, such places had developed to the point where many residents could afford small luxuries like pastries. Today, Holiland, which has more than a thousand branches across China, is still privately owned by Luo Hong. Its annual sales are reportedly more than three hundred million dollars, and a spinoff bakery, Timicigi, is controlled by Luo Li.
In January, 2003, as a break from work at Holiland’s corporate headquarters, in Beijing, the Luo brothers went skiing at a small mountain on the outskirts of the capital. By then, they had reached the golf-playing stage of success, but Luo Li had never liked the game. At the age of forty-one, he wanted to find another form of recreation, and he got hooked by that first ski trip. Later that winter, he made a trip to Yongpyong resort, in South Korea.
“I realized that ski resorts in Korea were huge and packed with people,” Luo Li told me, when I visited him at Wanlong. “There wasn’t anything like that around Beijing.”
Luo and I met in a private club on the ninth floor of Longgong, one of three hotels that he owns at the resort. It was bitterly cold—that morning, the temperature was six degrees below zero. In the private club, a twenty-foot-high window overlooked three of the most challenging runs, and we could see a few skiers and snowboarders making their way down the steep slopes. Luo commented that the conditions were too cold and windy for most people.
He was in his late fifties, a handsome, trim man with a light beard. His trademark outfit is all white—when we met, he wore a white shirt, a white down vest, white trousers, and unlaced white high-tops. He had the well-tanned look of a recreation-industry entrepreneur, although, in another Chinese departure from type, he chain-smoked Guiyan-brand cigarettes throughout our conversation.
Luo told me that after the South Korea trip, in 2003, he had driven around the mountains west of Beijing, scouting potential resort sites. Chongli was about a five-hour drive from the capital, with seven-thousand-foot-high mountains whose impoverished villages were losing residents. Somebody had opened a single ski run with a towline, and local Communist Party officials told Luo that they had been hoping for an entrepreneur with big ideas.
He broke ground that summer. His initial investment was more than a million dollars, and the following winter he was able to open three runs. Often, only forty or fifty people showed up. At that point, Luo realized that he had miscalculated. He had designed a resort appropriate for people like himself, who had reached a moderate skill level, but the country was full of novices.
Rather than restructure Wanlong, Luo decided to encourage future generations of better skiers. For more than fifteen years, the resort’s policy has been that any university student gets a free lift pass, all season long, and the same is true for primary-school children below one and a half metres in height. My daughters, who are in the fourth grade, paid nothing to ski. But middle-school and high-school students aren’t eligible for free lift tickets. Luo explained that this is because those kids need to study in order to get into college. “They don’t have time for this,” he said.
Luo told me that in 2006 Li Qingchun, the top Communist Party official in the county, persuaded the provincial government to reroute a planned highway so that it passed through the district. Travel time from Beijing was cut almost in half, and soon other large investors arrived, including a pair of Malaysian tycoons. They built a resort called Genting, the same name as many gambling halls around the world that are owned by one of the investors. In 2015, as China prepared its bid for the Winter Olympics, the region was well positioned. The bid specified that events would be split between Beijing and Zhangjiakou, a city in Hebei that administers Chongli.
Chongli now has seven resorts, and more than 2.35 million people visited the district during the last ski season. Wanlong has expanded to thirty runs, three gondolas, three chairlifts, and a total hotel capacity of nearly two thousand. But Luo has stubbornly stuck to his idea of serving the moderate-to-skilled skier, even though he knows that beginners are better business. “I’ve been losing money since 2003,” he told me. I asked when he expected to start turning an annual profit, and he took a drag on his cigarette. “Maybe in ten years,” he said. He explained that it was going to take a while for Chinese people to get better at skiing. Thus far, he said, the total investment in Wanlong had been more than three hundred million dollars, half of which had come from his own fortune. The other half was loans.
A couple of days after we met, somebody in Chongli showed me a video of Luo clearing tables in the Wanlong cafeteria. I assumed that this was a stunt—the owner working alongside staff while the cameras rolled. But during our week at the resort Leslie and I saw Luo cleaning up in the cafeteria every day. Sometimes diners recognized him and asked him to pose for pictures, but usually they didn’t notice. Often, he worked alone in a part of the cafeteria where people had already cleared out. One morning, I saw him by the main chairlift, studying a long line of skiers. “It’s too crowded,” he said. “I’m trying to see what we can do about that.”
I realized that if I had follow-up questions I could show up in the dining hall around one o’clock and find Luo, resplendent in all white, pushing a cart full of dirty plates. This was another Chinese twist on the ski-town narrative: the visionary millionaire, after rising from humble beginnings in Asbestos, creates a ski resort out of nothing, and then the story ends with him busing tables and wiping food off the floor. When I asked Luo why he always wore white, he said, “It’s because I pray for snow every day.”
Chongli averages about a tenth of an inch of precipitation during December and January. A number of years ago, Luo invested in a hundred and twenty domestic-brand snow guns, at ten thousand dollars each. But he quickly decided that the machines were too small, and he relegated them to a warehouse. They were replaced with larger snow guns, made by two foreign companies called TechnoAlpin and Sufag, which stand in fixed positions along the ski runs at intervals of two hundred feet. Katie Ertl, the senior vice-president of mountain operations at Aspen Skiing Company, in Colorado, told me that she had visited Wanlong in 2016 and was impressed by the concentration of snow-making machines. “They had a hundred and twenty-three snow guns on one run,” she said. “It was pretty phenomenal.”
Before arriving at Wanlong, I hadn’t realized how demanding the resort would be for an absolute beginner. It wasn’t that I was alone—along with the snow guns, there was a fairly phenomenal concentration of ignorance around the magic carpet, the conveyor belt that hauled novices up the easiest hill. Sometimes I saw parents or grandparents in loafers and heels, standing on either side of a child on rented skis. The adults would shuffle in the snow, holding the kid upright; because of the free admission for children, it was a low-cost way to spend an afternoon. Beside the magic carpet, warning signs illustrated some of the stunts that people must have pulled here. One sign featured a stick figure who appeared to be lying down and taking a nap on the conveyor belt.
Many beginners wore accessories known as huju: protective gear. Huju consists of three large stuffed animals that can be strapped onto the knees and the backside, in order to cushion a fall. The most common huju comes in the form of green turtles, but there are also brown bears, pink pigs, and yellow SpongeBob SquarePants. There doesn’t seem to be any social stigma attached to wearing these things, which are common at ski resorts across China. At Wanlong, it wasn’t unusual to see a hip-looking snowboarder in his twenties, dressed in fashionable ski clothes, with a huge turtle on his butt.
For me, the problem was what happened when I graduated from the magic-carpet hill to the green slopes, the easiest runs. At Wanlong, if you get on a chairlift and intend to go down a green, your only option is Long Dragon, which is nearly three miles and has a number of sections that are demanding for a beginner. This was in keeping with Luo Li’s philosophy, and it was exhausting. On my first day, I hired a coach, who taught me the basics along the magic carpet. After that, we took the lift up to Long Dragon, where a digital countdown sign read “352 Days Until the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics.”
By the time I reached the bottom, after multiple falls, we were about an hour closer to the Olympics. Periodically, I stopped to rest, and the coach flopped in the snow and smoked a Nanjing-brand cigarette. But he kept me out of trouble, and after a half day I had learned some of the basics of turning and stopping. That was one of Wanlong’s biggest surprises—the quality of instruction seemed respectable. Leslie and the girls were already competent skiers, but they signed up for a private lesson. When Leslie requested a coach who might be able to help with techniques for moguls, the ski school assigned a twenty-two-year-old named Zhang Chao. Zhang observed our daughters, made a rapid diagnosis, and was able to guide them through some adjustments. By the end of the first lesson, they were making much smoother turns. In Leslie’s opinion, the instruction was as good as anything they had received at Telluride.
One morning, I stopped by the office of the ski school’s director, a man in his mid-fifties named Gu Maolin. He had posted a sign that read, in Chinese:
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Self-actualization
Self-esteem needs
Social needs
Safety requirements
Physiological needs
Gu had enjoyed a successful career as an entrepreneur in the Chinese tech industry. He had worked for a number of years at Fujitsu, in Japan, and he had also studied business at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia. When I asked why he had switched to his current job, he explained that he had been inspired by his experience as a client of the ski school, in 2008.
“I was one of the victims,” Gu said. “I broke six ribs here at Wanlong. The teacher was a retired racer from a provincial youth team. I was taught to carve. Carving is pretty good, but it’s dangerous if you don’t have good control. I crashed into the netting.”
Gu told me that Chinese ski schools have a terrible track record. “A lot of customers get hurt,” he said, explaining that there is a tradition of hiring former national and provincial ski-team athletes. “They are very good at skiing, but they are not educators.”
“Whenever I feel the need to procrastinate, I just eat something instead.” Cartoon by Drew Panckeri
At Wanlong, Gu had instituted better safety training for instructors, who usually number around three hundred and fifty. By 2025, according to Xinhua, the state-run news service, more than five thousand Chinese educational institutions will include winter sports.
Zhang Chao, the coach who taught my daughters, was a graduate of one of these programs. He had grown up in a village near Chongli, where his parents were factory workers. As a teen-ager, Zhang saw some ski videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and thought they looked cool. He persuaded his parents to allow him to enroll at the Chongli Vocational and Technical Education Center, which had recently started a ski-instructor course.
Zhang had never tried the sport, and he didn’t touch snow for the first half year of the program. It began in the summer, with students studying theory, performing calisthenics, and going for long runs. “I was wondering, ‘What good will this do?’ ” Zhang told me. “And the teacher said, ‘You’ll find out in the winter.’ ”
When Zhang was finally taken to the top of a snow-covered mountain, he was petrified. “I’m afraid of heights,” he explained. The instructor told him he had two options: he could ski down, or he could walk. In time, Zhang excelled at the sport, and he graduated with honors. He lived in a dormitory with eight-man rooms in downtown Chongli. Zhang usually earned around a thousand dollars a month, a good wage for somebody in his early twenties. The pay depends on the number of clients, and a handful of Wanlong’s top coaches earn as much as five thousand dollars a month in the peak season. During our visit, the fee for a full-day private lesson was around a hundred and fifty dollars, roughly a fifth of what it would have cost at Telluride during high season.
We hired Zhang almost every day. My daughters loved him: he was skilled, good-humored, and cuter than K-pop, with a big smile and spiky bright-blue hair. He weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, and he told me that the hardest part of his job was when he had to snowplow backward while holding onto a heavy client. After my initial lesson, I switched to Zhang. On my second day, he took me back to Long Dragon, where the Olympic-countdown sign had a new number: 350 days.
“Sandian yixian! ” Zhang instructed. “Three points, one line!” He was referring to weight distribution—ankles, knees, and shoulders. After a few falls, he confiscated my poles. “They’re distracting you,” he said sternly.
By our second run, I was improving. “Pretend there’s a piece of fruit on the end of your ski!” Zhang shouted, when I was trying to make a turn.
I came to a stop. “Why fruit?” Even after many years, I was confused by all the random things that Chinese people connect to food.
“It doesn’t have to be fruit,” Zhang explained. “Just think of something you want. You need to lean forward when you turn.”
Soon, I was doing better with my edges, but every now and then I wiped out. Zhang told me to relax, which was impossible—among other things, I was terrified of hearing the words “It’s time to get you a butt turtle.” At the end of the lesson, though, Zhang seemed satisfied. He believed that another half day would do the trick.
After each lesson, I took a day off to drive around the mountains. The peaks were rocky and steep, with overgrown crop terraces on the lower flanks. In the past two decades, as part of a nationwide campaign to increase forest cover and prevent erosion, the government has compensated farmers for retiring cropland and planting trees in mountainous areas. Around Chongli, villagers told me that they had received a flat fee, usually a few thousand dollars for less than an acre, along with a small monthly subsidy. In these parts, it’s rare for anybody to farm seriously anymore.
I drove up a valley in the east of Chongli, where the villages got emptier the higher I climbed. At a place called Erdaoying, residents told me that about a third of the population had left, and a number of the teen-agers were enrolled in the vocational ski school that Zhang had attended. Farther up the road, at Mazhangzi, people estimated that two-thirds of their neighbors were gone. The next village, Zhuanzhilian, felt even quieter.
At the top of the valley, I reached the emptiest settlement of all: the Olympic Village. It consisted of about thirty buildings, most of them three and four stories tall, arranged around courtyards. The exteriors were nearly completed, with beige tiles, black roofs, and sleek glass-fronted balconies. In this remote, windswept place, the village had the air of a mirage, and an information board explained that everything had been designed and positioned with the help of computational-fluid-dynamics simulation software. Among other useful details, the board noted that in the heart of the village “the difference in wind pressure between the windward and leeward surfaces of the buildings is no more than five pascals.”
Nobody seemed to be working, so I went inside a few buildings. I wandered through darkened hallways, past bags of unmixed cement and piles of Huida-brand floor tiles. In the athletes’ rooms, the walls were unfinished, and plumbing had yet to be installed. After half an hour, I heard the sound of a small truck outside, and I found a worker who was hauling ice and construction debris. He said that everybody else would return from the Spring Festival holiday in a few days. They had been told that they had to finish the village by the end of June.
Other Olympic projects also had summer deadlines. In downtown Chongli, a construction company was preparing a park for a winter-sports museum and various Olympic ceremonies, and the security guard at the gate told me that they had to complete everything by August 31st. In front of the park, an artist’s rendering featured a dense grove of trees, a large sculpture based on the five Olympic rings, and a futuristic building of glass and steel. Like other artists’ depictions I saw around Chongli, it portrayed everything covered in a thick layer of fresh snow.
That week, the Olympic test runs were in full swing: cross-country skiing, half-pipe snowboarding, and ski jumping. None of it was open to the public, but one afternoon I met with a staffer at the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in a hotel at Thaiwoo, one of the Chongli resorts. Traffic cones ran down the middle of the hallways, in order to maintain a one-way passage, for covidcontrol. Before coming to Chongli, the staffer had received two doses of a state-produced vaccine, and now, like everybody else involved in the event, he was tested every seventy-two hours. Since the start of the pandemic, there had not been a single infection reported in Chongli.
The opening ceremonies are scheduled for February 4, 2022, and I asked the staffer if the Games might be postponed. “Our most recent news is that it’s going to happen according to schedule,” he said.
He showed me a video from the previous night’s half-pipe-snowboarding test. It resembled a real televised competition: advertising banners lined the course, and athletes wore authentic-looking Olympic bibs. An announcer described performances in an excited voice, and other people played the role of spectators, cheering on each mock competitor. In a stroke of branding genius, the Chinese had even sold market placement at an invisible event—they’d found corporate sponsors for the test. In his hotel room, the staffer wore a blue jacket with logos for Yulin Cashmere and Sheep Leader, brands I had never heard of. He was preparing for the next day’s activities by studying a sixty-five-page International Ski Federation document about regulations for cross-country skiing. It lay open to a section entitled “Pit Stop boxes for Skiathlon and long-distance races.”
After a year in which China’s international reputation had been badly damaged, officials seemed even more determined than usual to avoid negative press. In early January, there was a death at the Genting resort, when a fast-moving skier caught a wire buried in the snow. Some initial reports of the accident appeared online, followed by silence—supposedly, the police were going to investigate, but no results were ever published. In February, there was another incident at Genting. The Chinese Foreign Ministry organized a trip for diplomats to tour some of Chongli’s competitive venues, and the Ukrainian Ambassador to China had a heart attack in the lobby of his hotel. He was transported to a hospital in Beijing, where he died. The few foreign reports of the death didn’t mention the Olympic tour, but, the next time the Foreign Ministry escorted a group of ambassadors to Chongli, the Chinese made sure to bring a large medical team. “They had all of this heart-attack equipment,” a diplomat told me, in Beijing.
The diplomat had participated in a ministry tour to Xiaohaituo Mountain, where the Alpine-skiing events will take place. None of Chongli’s slopes are steep enough for such competitions, so Chinese Olympic officials settled on Xiaohaituo, a remote mountain in the wilderness west of Beijing. They spent four years reshaping the site, installing seven roads, eleven lifts, and seven ski runs, with a maximum slope of sixty-eight degrees. “It’s built to such professional specifications that once the Olympics is over no one can use it unless you are basically an Olympic skier,” the diplomat told me. She said that a friend in the Beijing government boasted to her about the steepness of the run, claiming that only two hundred people in the world have the skill necessary to ski it properly.
Around ten years ago, the Chinese press periodically published articles that were critical of water waste in three recreation industries: ski resorts, artificial hot springs, and golf courses. At that time, resorts associated with these industries were being built around Beijing, which faces an acute water shortage. Most of the capital’s tap water is piped in from the Han River, more than seven hundred miles to the south, through an eighty-billion-dollar diversion project.
After Beijing won the Olympic bid, critical stories about the ski industry essentially stopped appearing in the Chinese press. Recently, in the capital, I met with a researcher who had studied recreation-industry water-use issues in the past. He claimed that he had ended his investigation of the ski industry because of a lack of personal interest, but he also requested that his name not be used. “My stories about skiing never had a big impact,” he said. He contrasted ski resorts with golf courses and hot springs, which had become targets of government campaigns for better environmental practices. Since then, many such sites have been shut down, and the researcher seemed satisfied. “The amount of water used for skiing isn’t that bad,” he told me. “It’s a lot less than golf, and less than the hot springs.”
In today’s China, such a mind-set is understandable for any activist: pick your battles carefully. And, after decades of intense development that depended largely on heavy industry and manufacturing, there is a tendency to view tourism as a preferable alternative. “Those who take a development view can argue that local regions need to develop,” Ma Jun, the founder and director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a nonprofit, told me. “They can either depend on the tourism industry, or they can depend on the manufacturing industry.”
Luo Li had told me that Wanlong’s total water use during the winter season, including snow-making, is several hundred thousand tons. Ma Jun said that his organization once documented an industrial-scale dyehouse that expelled more than forty thousand tons of wastewater a day. “The per-unit use generates more income,” Ma said, of the tourism industry. He also noted that commercial development of mountainous regions tends to be limited, because of strict land-use laws and the government’s approval process. Luo Li hasn’t developed condos or ski homes in the hills around Wanlong—another reason he has trouble making money.
In Colorado, part of my ambivalence about skiing came from the excesses of resort towns, and some aspects of Chongli felt similar. But the arc of development in China is so compressed, in terms of time, that issues of poverty often seem less abstract than they do in the U.S. In Chongli’s villages, I didn’t meet anybody who wasn’t supportive of the ski industry, even individuals whose farmland had been taken for resort development. As far as they were concerned, the government was bound to reclaim their land anyway, and at least the resorts provided jobs.
Many people, including Luo Li, seemed slightly befuddled when I brought up environmental issues. From their perspective, it was a service to get city residents outdoors in a place with clean air. Of course, when I asked Luo about Wanlong’s water use, he was busing tables in the cafeteria, which put a different spin on our exchange. Luo’s personal arc was also compressed—in China, some members of the first generation of successful entrepreneurs can be remarkably unspoiled. Wanlong hadn’t been selected to host any of Chongli’s Olympic events, in part because it’s not as close as Genting to a new high-speed-rail link to Beijing. But Luo said that this wasn’t important to him, and he also didn’t talk much about developing China’s competitive skiing.
For Luo, the point of Wanlong seemed to be community rather than nationalism, or competition, or even business. Once, I asked if he regretted spending so much money on the resort, and he admitted that for years it had bothered him. “Then one time I was very calm, and I thought, Since I started investing here, I have brought jobs,” Luo said. “People from Beijing don’t have to go far to ski. My employees have jobs, and they can afford houses and cars, and raise children, and get married.” He continued, “I felt that I shouldn’t be so selfish and narrow-minded. I shouldn’t think that not making money is frustrating.” He added, “You see, I’m quite a happy skier, and when I see many people skiing happily it makes me even happier.”
During our week at Wanlong, Leslie and the girls skied every day. It wasn’t Telluride, but they didn’t get bored; there were a few mogul runs, along with some pretty sections where skilled skiers could go through the trees. Most days, they were taught by Zhang Chao. When I checked his WeChat account, I saw that he often posted inspirational quotes from staff meetings with Luo Li.
“I’ve decided to go to law school, become a lawyer, then quickly realize it wasn’t what I wanted.” Cartoon by Julia Suits
During my third lesson, the countdown sign at the top of the mountain said that there were three hundred and forty-eight days until the Olympics. Zhang gave me back my poles. Finally, all his instructions clicked, and I skied Long Dragon without wiping out. Later that day, I did the run again, because I had promised my daughters that, after all these years, I would finally accompany them on skis. They were patient: we proceeded slowly down the mountain. I knew that I would never be good at this. But I like to think of myself as the first person in history who spent fourteen years as a tax-paying resident of Colorado and then learned to ski in Hebei.
In February, 2001, I had accompanied the I.O.C. inspection commission on the final day of its tour of Beijing, as part of the city’s bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. The commission spent the day visiting various sites where Chinese officials promised that stadiums and arenas could be constructed. Every time our motorcade approached a traffic light, it instantly turned green. At that time, Beijing had only two subway lines—today, there are more than twenty—and the city had failed in its previous Olympic bid, in 1993, for the 2000 summer games.
For both of those initial bids, the issue of human rights was prominent. One difference, though, was that in 2001 even activist groups backed the Olympic effort. China was in the midst of a brutal crackdown on the Falun Gong religious movement, but the group’s adherents made a point of staging no protests while the I.O.C. was in town. Shortly after the inspection, the anonymous authors of “The Tiananmen Papers,” a collection of leaked government documents about the 1989 massacre in the capital, published an Op-Ed in the Times supporting the bid. The title was “the olympics can help reform.”
Back then, I spoke with John MacAloon, a professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago, who specializes in the history and politics of the Olympic movement. MacAloon was closely connected with the I.O.C.—the previous year, he had served on the organization’s reform commission—and he told me that many members of the committee compared China to South Korea. In 1981, when the I.O.C. awarded the Games to Seoul, the country was ruled by a military regime, but by the time of the opening ceremonies, in 1988, it had become a democracy. Political analysts generally agreed that the Olympics had contributed to this change, in part because the Games inspired closer press coverage of Korea’s pro-democracy movement. In 2001, MacAloon told me that some I.O.C. members, along with a significant reformist element within the Chinese government, believed that Beijing might experience something similar. “The people who want the Olympics know what it means to have twenty-one thousand journalists in town,” he said at the time. “They see the Games as leading to something totally different.”
Exactly twenty years and six days after that conversation, MacAloon and I spoke again, by phone. He told me that, though he had never shared the faith of others that the Olympics would bring democracy to China, he regretted his relative optimism: “I look back, and I say, ‘As bad as we understood the policies toward Tibet to be then—my God, look at them now.’ ” He went on, “And the policies toward Uyghur Muslims. I’m a little bit embarrassed that I never could have imagined it.”
In 2001, it was relatively easy to speak with both the I.O.C. and Chinese officials about Beijing’s bid. At that time, I interviewed the vice-mayor of Beijing, a Chinese member of the I.O.C., and various other government figures involved in athletics, and all of them emphasized China’s desire to engage with the outside world. “In the past, we were closed, so there weren’t many exchanges with other countries,” He Huixian, the vice-president of the Chinese Olympic Committee, told me. This year, the Beijing 2022 Committee declined my request for an interview, asking me to submit written questions instead, and refused to comment on human rights. The I.O.C. also declined to speak on the record. A spokesman sent an anodyne statement that the organization has been distributing to journalists. (“Given the diverse participation in the Olympic Games, the I.O.C. must remain neutral on all global political issues.”)
MacAloon told me that such silence on the part of the I.O.C. is unprecedented. “Can they really hold the policy of never uttering a word about the Uyghur situation through the whole of the Games?” he said. “Right now, they seem to think they can.” Mandie McKeown, the director of the International Tibet Network, sent me a letter that her organization had received from the I.O.C. in 2015, shortly before Beijing was awarded the Winter Games. The letter said that China had given the I.O.C. “assurances” about human rights, the right to demonstrate, and the media’s right to report freely on the Games, among other issues. For more than five years, McKeown and others have repeatedly asked the I.O.C. to clarify the nature of these assurances, but the organization has never done so. McKeown told me that she had met with the I.O.C. in October, via video conference. “It wasn’t the most productive meeting in the world, to be honest,” she said. “They spent a lot of time telling us that boycotts don’t work.” A subsequent meeting, in March, also failed to reach a resolution.
McKeown supports a boycott of the Games, as do a number of human-rights groups, but such an action seems highly unlikely. “There is too much at stake,” a European diplomat in Beijing said, mentioning the possibility of political or economic retaliation from China. “A lot of Europeans are good in winter sports, and they have huge economic interests.”
In March, Senator Mitt Romney published an Op-Ed in the Times in which he opposed a full boycott of the Games. Though he supported athlete participation, he called for U.S. government officials to make a statement by not attending the opening ceremonies and other Olympic events. Last month, Nancy Pelosiendorsed this approach, calling for a diplomatic boycott. The most direct protest statements during the Games seem likely to come from athletes, who may not be fully prepared to play political roles. “I’m really concerned that the Olympic authorities are just going to leave this all to the athletes,” MacAloon told me. “There will be personal boycotts and personal demonstrations. Are the Chinese authorities going to haul people out of the Olympic Village and deport them?”
The way that foreign media could be perceived in 2001—the twenty-one thousand journalists descending on Beijing—is also impossible to imagine today. Currently, there are about thirty American correspondents left in China—the government expelled many last year, as part of a tit-for-tat exchange with the Trump Administration. There’s no indication that pandemic restrictions on foreign entry will be loosened, and China has moved with a pronounced lack of urgency in vaccinating its citizens. This is one of many signs that the country’s leaders are not unhappy with the isolation of the past year and a half. Luo Li told me that in November he was given the option of having his Wanlong staff vaccinated, but he declined. He said that his workers hadn’t been eager to get the shots. “They thought we had a good situation here, so they didn’t want it,” he said. He added that he would have had to pay two hundred yuan, or about thirty dollars, for each vaccination, so he decided to wait. “Rumor has it that eventually it will be free,” he said.
Given everything that Luo has spent money on—the free lift passes for college students, the tech-industry head of his ski school, the hundred and twenty snow guns that were quickly relegated to a warehouse—it seemed remarkable that vaccination was not a priority. But this is common in China, where very few people know somebody who has been infected. The government’s pandemic strategy has enjoyed broad popular support, and, in a repressive political climate, it’s particularly unlikely that citizens will question what’s going on in Xinjiang. I almost never hear a Han Chinese person express curiosity about the issue, which is widely perceived as being exaggerated by the foreign media. For most Chinese, Xinjiang is remote, and the divides are linguistic, cultural, and religious, in addition to geographic. The odds of a Chinese person being good friends with an Uyghur or a Kazakh are probably even lower than the odds of knowing somebody who got covid.
Increasingly, activists are referring to Beijing 2022 as “the Genocide Olympics.” MacAloon told me that he dislikes the name, because it reduces China’s complexity to a single issue, albeit the one that he believes is most important. In Beijing, I had lunch with a few environmentalist writers and scholars, and I was surprised to find that they weren’t entirely pessimistic about this political moment. “It’s like a lake covered with ice,” one writer told me. “Beneath the ice, there are currents and movements. Things are happening. But you can’t see that from above. All you can see is the ice.”
As a university professor in Chengdu, I sometimes have a similar sensation. In the past two years, I’ve found many of my students to be surprisingly open and freethinking, and I’ve been impressed by their willingness to work hard. I recognize the same dedication and meticulousness in many other Chinese I encounter, ranging from Luo Li in the cafeteria and Zhang Chao on the Wanlong slopes to the local health officials in my neighborhood, who worked tirelessly in the early phase of the pandemic. This kind of energy has been crucial to the government’s covid strategy, which probably saved millions of lives while creating an environment in which citizens have been largely free from the psychological pressures of the pandemic.
But I can also recognize these same qualities—dedication, meticulousness, attention to detail—applied to horrifying effect in eyewitness accounts of the Xinjiang camps. The strategy is zero tolerance: essentially, the government has approached Uyghurs and other Muslim people as if any independent ideas about religion or politics were a virus that could be stamped out with relentless vigilance. And the fact that the vast majority of Chinese are unable to see this side of the system is part of the tragedy. The month after we left Chongli, the press reported that Luo Li had attended a meeting of what have become known as the seven “major league” ski resorts in China. The meeting was held in the spectacular Altay Mountains, in Xinjiang, which is home to three major-league resorts. Out there, the industry is still in the early stages, but I heard a number of skiers at Wanlong talking about it. They said that, if you want to find China’s best natural ski conditions, you should go to Xinjiang.
As part of Wanlong’s holiday pandemic policy, the resort offered free ski-in covid tests. Two days before our departure, my daughters and I glided to the bottom of the magic-carpet hill, stuck our skis in the snow, and clomped in our boots down to the testing room. A few minutes later, we were back on the chairlift.
The drive home was easy. On the way, we spent an extra day in Xi’an, to look at the terra-cotta warriors. It was the first time I had been to the site and not seen anybody else who looked like a foreigner. In Chengdu, I settled back into university routines, and every morning I drove my daughters to school, past a digital countdown sign that had been erected in Tianfu Square. This coming August, Chengdu planned to host the World University Games, and there had been reports that the city might make a joint bid, along with nearby Chongqing, to host the 2032 Summer Olympics.
On April 1st, the Fédération Internationale du Sport Universitaire, or fisu, announced that the Chengdu games would be postponed for a year, because of the pandemic. The countdown sign was cleared—the days, hours, minutes, and seconds all dropped to zero. Not long before fisu’s decision, Japan had declared that foreign spectators would not be admitted at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. People speculated that China would follow suit, but there wasn’t any official announcement. The I.O.C. remained silent on the issue of Xinjiang. Every day, I drove past Tianfu Square, and every day the digital sign said the same thing: 000:00:00:00.