Storm brews over golf course in conservation area
Environmental authorities and state media on the mainland have singled out local officials who “turned a blind eye” to an illegal golf course and villas in a conservation area, hammering home demands to comply with central government orders.
The accusations are similar to those unleashed during a political storm in 2018 when Beijing punished legions of officials for ignoring President Xi Jinping’s orders to remove illegal villas in a Shaanxi conservation area.
Inspectors from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said the golf course had been operating illegally in the Dianchi Lake conservation area in Kunming in Yunnan province since 2010, despite the central government banning such developments six years earlier, online news service The Paper reported. The report said people were seen playing golf on the course when inspectors visited on April 14 and course staff had tried to cover up the damage.
Inspectors also discovered that more than 1,000 houses had been built illegally in the area over the past six years, the report said.
On Friday, state news agency Xinhua attacked the officials in charge, questioning why the local authorities had ignored a central government order.
“The golf course in the Dianchi conservation area takes up 700 mu [46.7 hectares]. How come the local authorities turned a blind eye to it? How much profit is there in such a large project and who is covering up?”
The Xinhua report accused the Puning district government and Nuoshida Enterprise Group of ignoring orders issued by central government environmental inspectors in 2016 to clean up the area.
“The lessons of the illegal villas in Qinling Mountains should be remembered and the central government has also repeatedly asked [other local authorities] not to repeat their mistakes. So how come the local authorities [overseeing Dianchi] turned a blind eye?”
Yesterday, a separate commentary by Xiakedao, a social media outlet affiliated with People’s Daily, also compared the Dianchi property development to the Qinling scandal.
In 2018, a series of senior Communist Party officials in Shaanxi province were brought down after they were accused of ignoring Xi’s orders to remove 40 illegal villas in a protected zone in the Qinling Mountains.
Among them was Zhao Zhengyong, Shaanxi’s former party boss, who was given a suspended death sentence last year for his part in the scandal.