When the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing, "environmentalists were aghast," according to Lucy Hornby of the FINANCIAL TIMES. Not only would the city's "dwindling water supplies be further diminished to produce snow," it later emerged that some of the ski slopes to be built for the Games would be "carved through a nature preserve." But "water scarcity and nature are no obstacles in a planned economy." China President Xi Jinping is "adding his clout to China's leap into skiing, leading efforts to create a domestic ski industry almost from scratch." Beijing is "ploughing" 76B yuan ($11B) into the "massive redevelopment of Chongli, the winter sports town about four hours' drive away that will host most of the Olympic skiing events." The government is seeking to make Chongli the center of a "full-blown domestic ski industry to rival the best in Europe or North America," even though annual snowfall in the area is "no more than 70cm." After 40,000 visitors "poured into" the recent Beijing sporting goods and ski equipment exposition, Chinese state media "gushed" that the country had "lit the torch" for winter sports. Benny Wu, chief strategy officer for skiing at Vanke, one of the developers at Chongli, said, "The Winter Olympics isn't the end goal. By prompting Chinese to take up skiing it will be a driver for the winter sports industry." Xi's "love of football sparked a flood of investment into European clubs." A "similar effort to encourage skiing is also under way." Since Xi's visit to the Swiss ski town of Davos in January, "bankers across Asia have reported a rise in the number of Chinese looking to invest in winter sports operations overseas." China has targeted 1,000 ski resorts by '30, "almost double the number today." But the facilities are a "long way from what would be expected at Klosters or Aspen" -- a '15 paper on China's ski industry written by Wu showed that "only one in five had chairlifts." The China Daily reported this month that the Olympics "would help China reach its target" of 300 million skiers by '30, up from about 5 million today. Yet the state-run English-language newspaper admitted that "the strategy is challenged by issues such as low snowfall." Wu: "Right now, most people go skiing as an experiment. It's not a vacation activity yet" (FT, 3/3).
