I really enjoyed this article. In the print edition it was called Year of the Bunny Hill. There's some funny anecdotes in the article, but this isn't an article where he's making fun of Chinese ski resorts or ski culture. Part of it's about the author learning to ski (after he conquered the magic carpet, the only green run was 3 miles long and challenging); then there's the man who is trying to create the perfect ski resort there despite just bleeding money; the part about the ski instructor training schools was interesting too.
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.”
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.”
And of course, Olympics preparation. The test events here were cancelled this last World Cup season. Are they really going to race on such a steep demanding course with no test events?
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.