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You can’t call Xie a school dropout. He has never attended school. “He really didn’t want to go, and I thought it was a waste of time he could use for golf training,” his father said. As his peers went off to first grade, the outgoing boy enrolled in a succession of golf academies — first at Mission Hills at the Cindy Reid Golf Academy, named after an American teaching pro, then at one on Hainan Island run by Tiger Woods’s former coach, Hank Haney, and finally at a summer golf camp in Japan. Father and son are now back home, working on their own regimen. Xie’s parents still call him Xiao Bao, or Little Baby: at nearly 5-foot-3 (two inches shorter than his father) and 120 pounds, he dwarfs his 8-year-old competition. (Though his parents are small, their homeland in northeastern China is known for producing giants.) When asked to name his favorite club, Xie replied. “The driver, of course!” He can hit it nearly 220 yards, about as far as the average adult amateur — and about 50 yards past his peers.
The head of the state-run China Golf Association, Zhang Xiaoning, says that golf’s emphasis on technique and mental strength, rather than sheer athleticism, makes it “ideally suited” for Chinese. (China even claims that a stick-and-ball game played by the elites during the Song dynasty nearly a millennium ago is the actual precursor to golf.) The challenge now is to expand the pool of athletes in a game that is almost the exclusive preserve of the very rich. So far, the C.G.A. has teamed with corporations to host tournaments, teach golf in primary schools and build a sophisticated national golf training center. In March, China even signed up Greg Norman, a former world No. 1, to help develop a national team that could win Olympic medals. There’s little chance of that in 2016, but with Guan, Ye and the pack of prodigies on the horizon, the future of golf already seems to be tilting toward China.
China is producing some of the world’s best young golfers because wealthy families who have profited from the nation’s market reforms are replicating, in miniature, the formula of the socialist state sports system: pushing kids to specialize early and then having them chi ku, or “eat bitterness,” with relentless training. “Families are different in China,” says Chen Li, a golf father who accompanies his 10-year-old son through eight hours of training each weekend day. “In America, you offer kids a big plate with lots of choices, right? We give them a small plate — make them choose early — and stack it as high as possible.” He raised his hand higher and higher and then wobbled it. “The pressure can get pretty heavy.”
Not all of China’s top juniors have perfect technique — indeed, Guan’s swing is considered flawed — but their mental strength and self-confidence set them apart. At the Masters, the 14-year-old Guan startled reporters when, in his soft voice, he pronounced: “I wish, one day, I can win all four majors in one year.” Nobody has won golf’s Grand Slam in a calendar year in the modern era, not even Woods. Guan’s statement was too innocent to be considered arrogant, but it did reflect the sky-is-the-limit ambitions of modern China.

Ye hasn’t lagged far behind Guan in achievements or self-confidence. He broke par when he was 8. By 9, he was winning most tournaments in his age group in China. But filling his family’s three-story house with junior trophies — more than 100 now line the bookshelves — was never the ultimate goal. Early on, watching a P.G.A. tournament on TV, Ye fixated on Woods — not because of his swing or personality but because he pulled off brilliant shots under pressure. “Even when I was 9,” Ye told me, “I was dreaming about being No. 1 in the world.”