PDB Afternoon Bulletin | December 26th, 2025: Inside Xi Jinping’s Bizarre War on Golf

December 26, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: In this solo-hosted narrative bulletin, Mike Baker delivers a captivating historical deep-dive into golf's entangled role in Chinese politics and diplomacy, blending geopolitical analysis with ironic anecdotes to reveal why informal U.S.-style statecraft clashes with Beijing's rigid control. Analytical and wryly humorous.
The Format: This is a narrative story presented as a special edition monologue.
The Key Players:
Just Hosts: Mike Baker, ex-CIA operative turned podcast host, commands the episode with sharp solo commentary, pondering "big things" like golf diplomacy while injecting self-deprecating humor about his own sand trap struggles, creating an engaging one-man think-tank dynamic focused on U.S.-China tensions.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:34) **Introduction to Golf Diplomacy**
2 (01:28) **Trump and Shinzo Abe's Golf Relationship**
3 (02:05) **Questioning Golf Diplomacy with Xi Jinping**
4 (02:42) **CCP's View of Golf Under Xi**
5 (03:18) **Historical Roots: Mao Zedong Era**
6 (04:14) **Deng Xiaoping Reforms and Golf Revival**
7 (05:21) **Golf Boom's Political Problems**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In this special edition of the PDB Afternoon Bulletin--We take a step back from the daily headlines to explore one of the strangest political fault lines in modern China: Xi Jinping’s war on the game of golf. We explain how golf became associated with corruption, elite privilege, and unwanted Western influence inside the Chinese Communist Party—and why Party officials learned to treat it as politically radioactive. We trace the story from Mao Zedong’s condemnation of the sport, through China’s underground golf boom, to Xi’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign that turned golf clubs into targets.

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