> January 2022

Beijing Olympics boost China’s ski industry

The Chinese take to the slopes

China has big plans for skiing as a casual leisure activity. Today it has nearly 800 ski resorts,
including indoor centres that will take 3,000 people.

by Jordan Pouille

J
ust a few weeks ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics (4-20 February) in
Beijing, China’s state-owned broadcaster CCTV (China Central
Television) showed the short documentary Guardians of the White
Mountain, about the workers who maintain the ski slopes.

First is Sun Duncheng, 53, who operates the snow cannons at the White
Mountain Ski Resort in Fusong, Jilin Province, in China’s northeast. It’s hard
work: they run all night, from 8pm to 8am, and at the slightest hiccup — a blocked
water pipe, a malfunctioning fan — he gets a smartphone alert.

Next is Gao Wenbin, who drives a snow groomer on caterpillar tracks, smoothing
the resort’s 30 slopes by the light of its powerful headlights. The voiceover says,
‘Snow has created new employment opportunities’ and tells us that the
government aims to get 300 million Chinese involved in winter sports.

Wu Bin (‘Benny Wu’) is a lecturer at Beijing Sport University, vice-chairman of

the Beijing Ski Association, and a former chief strategy officer at China Vanke,
one of the country’s four largest property developers. In July 2021, as for the last
five years, he published the latest version of his China Ski Industry White Book,
which reveals China now has 770 winter sports resorts, compared to only one in
1996 and 200 in 2008.

More a fun pastime than a sport

The industry chalked up 20.76 million skier days in the 12 months from April
2020. Eighty per cent of these were on man-made snow, and 83% of the skiers
were under the age of 50. Most were beginners: only 22% of ski runs are higher
than 100m. In the words of French researchers Arnaud Waquet and Sarah
Mischler, ‘China is the world’s biggest beginner skier market’ (1).

‘You need to develop a simple method so people can learn [to ski] in half a day,’
they say, ‘especially if you want to capture the wealthy middle-class market.’
Chinese people tend to regard skiing not as a sport that requires training but as a
fun pastime: ‘After two or three hours’ skiing, people we spoke to at the resort said
they were ready to do something else: go shopping, use the spa or take a hot bath,
but the most popular was going to a restaurant.’

Instead of Aspen or Courchevel

The wealthiest go skiing in China’s northeast, at Beidahu or Yabuli, where Club
Med, owned by China’s Fosun Group since 2015, has a centre. In December, full-
board package deals including equipment hire cost $2,250-3,400 per person per
week (two or three times the average monthly salary in Beijing or Shanghai).
Visitors include Hong Kong residents: for the last two years the pandemic has
prevented them from flying to Aspen or Courchevel, which even has a qualified
Chinese instructor.

Winter sports on a grand scale are an extension of China’s efforts to expand and
diversify domestic tourism. They first appeared in the late 1990s, after a series of
working hours reforms, and the introduction of Golden Week holidays — special
vacations for employees of government agencies, and of nearly all companies,
around Chinese New Year and China’s National Day (1 October).

‘It’s no accident that the first ski resorts appeared in the 2000s,’ when China
received a large injection of technology and knowhow from abroad, say the
researchers. France’s Poma, the world leader in ski lifts, which built the Great
Wall cable car in 1987, supplied many cable cars, including one from Lianshi, a
former mining town in Guizhou Province in the southwest, to Mt Meihuashan,
nearly 10km away, which has a restaurant with a panoramic view. A second cable
car runs from there to a ski resort with an average winter temperature of between
1 and 10°C.

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For nature lovers, there are also resorts in Xinjiang, home to the Uyghurs and
other ethnic minorities: 65 resorts have sprung up in the mountains of this far-
western province since 2013, some at more than 3,000m altitude, where there is
natural snow. Tourism has played a part in the planned Sinification of these
remote areas.

‘Business was brisk at first, because there was a political purpose, but in the past
three years it’s slowed down a lot. We have far fewer projects,’ said Fabien Felli,
Poma vice-president. A ski resort in Lhasa, Tibet, heralded in the People’s Daily in
2016, was never built. ‘The economic model was not properly thought out because
the resort-building was mainly driven by property developers as a way to sell
apartments.’ The collapse of China’s giant Evergrande development group showed
property was no longer a safe bet. According to Felli, ‘you need apartments and
infrastructure of course, but you also need to provide services to bring life to the
resort: restaurants, karaoke rooms and cinemas, like in South Korea, where the
something-for-everyone formula has proved so successful.’

‘Indoor skiing will take off’

In this climate, indoor ski centres designed like amusement parks and located in
the suburbs of major cities (conveniently close to their large middle-class target
market), are flourishing. Indoor skiing, once seen as odd, is gaining popularity,
and China is now a world leader, with 36 centres, ahead of India (ten), Finland
(eight) and the Netherlands (seven). It is building 30 more.

Guangzhou has China’s biggest indoor centre, Sunac Snow Park. With a snow
area of 56,000 square metres, including five ski slopes and other snow attractions,
it can accommodate 3,000 visitors at one time. The entrance charge is around $45
and includes equipment and winter wear. ‘I’m certain that indoor skiing will take
off,’ Felli said. ‘It’s basically an amusement park, and those do very well in China.’
For beginners, indoor skiing is an easy route into outdoor skiing. Shanghai is
building a centre twice the size, the Wintastar, near Shanghai Disneyland, and
Poma is involved.
Beijing believes it has the right formula. The former Shougang steelworks, near
the 5th ring road, has been turned into a vast green space and renamed Shougang
Big Air, with a Starbucks, a lake filled with fish and a long snowboard slope
covered in man-made snow. The city has also built a new driverless bullet train
that cuts journey time to the ski slopes near Zhangjiakou, 200km away, from over
three hours to just 47 minutes, via a tunnel under the Great Wall.

‘Even then, the resort will have to become an amusement park that’s not just for
skiers,’ Felli said. ‘At the moment the fees are high, and skiing is less fun than in
Courchevel or in Japan because it’s man-made snow, and it can get very cold, with
strong winds.’

Ski sales have yet to take off but snowboards are doing well, despite the pandemic.
That’s probably because of celebrities such as Su Yiming, 17, a snowboarder from
Jilin Province who trains in Austria. His unique acrobatic skills have gone viral on
Douyin (a version of TikTok for the domestic market) (2), earning him television
appearances and lucrative sponsorships. He was selected for the Beijing Olympics
after winning the Men’s Snowboard Big Air at Steamboat 2021 Visa Big Air in
Colorado. Chinese fans will be following his performance closely. And that could
lead to a surge in people taking up snowboarding.

Jordan Pouille
Jordan Pouille is a journalist.

Translated by Charles Goulden

(1) Sarah Mischler and Arnaud Waquet, ‘La glocalisation du sport en Chine: Le cas des stations de ski dans
le contexte des Jeux olympiques de Pékin 2022’ (Glocalising sport in China: ski resorts in the context of
the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games), Management & Organisations du Sport, Episciences, Villeurbanne,
forthcoming.

(2) Both are owned by China’s ByteDance, but TikTok is not accessible in China.