Chinese Refuse to Take a Powder on Ski Contest

Only two weeks ago, China’s ambitious dreams of turning this frigid northern Manchurian village into an international ski resort were on a steep slope to disaster.

It had not snowed since November. The ski runs on Upside-Down-Pot Mountain were bare earth and rock. Officials feared that they would be forced to cancel the ski competition in this week’s 3rd Asian Winter Games, showcase of China’s fledgling ski tourism industry.

Finally, several hundred peasant farmers in Heilongjiang province answered their leaders’ frantic radio appeal for help. Working nonstop until the games opened Sunday with an inaugural ceremony attended by President Jiang Zemin, the Yabuli peasants scooped snow from surrounding valleys and forests into plastic bags and carried it on their backs to the barren slopes.

As a result, the Alpine runs were packed with snow and the games were saved. Local officials, who with Hong Kong business partners had spent millions of dollars equipping the resort with state-of-the-art ski lifts and a 90-meter Olympic ski jump, were full of praise for the strong backs of the Chinese peasantry.

“God did not help us,” said Yabuli Ski Resort director Zou Anzheng, who had waited in vain for a snowstorm, “but the Chinese peasants did. Without the peasants we could not have staged the event. This proves the strength of the Chinese socialist system.”

Skiers from 16 countries, who included a Kuwaiti oil sheik and a powerful cross-country contingent from Kyrgyzstan, complained that rocks and pieces of wood in the hand-packed snow damaged their skis. But they marveled at the achievement of the Chinese masses.

“This could only happen in China,” said an admiring Nassim Kaul, coach of the 10-member Lebanese team, as he stood this week at the snow-packed base of the giant slalom run. “Any other country would have given up.”

Yabuli will not yet be confused with Aspen or Val d’Isere. Nestled in stands of pine and birch 125 miles southeast of Harbin, the resort is the newest of six ski resorts created in economically depressed Manchuria.

The development has been criticized by some Communist Party officials as catering too much to foreigners and China’s emerging bourgeoisie. The same critics have attacked communities in southern China for building golf courses aimed at the same clientele.

So far the resort has only 500 standard rooms for skiing guests. And it is yet to be seen how the international set will respond to the apres-ski noodle shop that has been opened on the site.

But local officials, desperate to lure tourists to the economically crippled industrial region in the north, had hoped that by hosting the Asian Winter Games they would get a shot at the 2002 or 2006 Winter Olympics. The 2002 games have been awarded to Salt Lake City; 2006 hasn’t been announced.

Yabuli resort director Zou, who has spent 25 years attempting to build a ski industry in China, said the main target of the resort is affluent families in Hong Kong, Macao and China’s bigger cities who seek an alternative to European and American ski resorts. “This is the skiing cradle of China,” said Zou.

Ski resorts in the ethnic Korean areas of Jilin province have their sights on South Korean and Japanese ski aficionados. One of the Chinese resorts is on Chang Bai Shan Mountain, which straddles China and North Korea and is considered a sacred site in Korea.

In terms of sports, the Asian Winter Games have been a mixed bag for China. Its women’s 3,000-meter speed-skating relay team set a world record.

Chinese hockey fans paid scalpers’ prices of 200 yuan to get into the new Harbin hockey arena, part of a new winter sports complex that the Manchurian city built to host the games and to present itself as a potential Olympic site. But the Chinese team was humiliated by Japan 7-1 on Thursday in Harbin.

It was a bitter defeat for the region of China that fell under Japanese occupation in 1931 and where anti-Japanese sentiment still runs high.

But thanks to the peasants of Yabuli, the Chinese could still claim a victory in that the games took place at all.

“It was very difficult to find the snow. Sometimes you had to go deep in the woods,” said Wang Taiqu, 40, a farmer from Qingshan village near Yabuli who was paid about $4 a day for being part of the snow brigade.