Part of me views golf as a great game and huge economic asset to Hawaii. But I also see where George Carlin was coming from when he called it, among other things, an inequitable use of land.

I don’t think Chinese government officials got the idea from watching the late great comic’s old routine, but recently they’ve cracked down on what was a free-for-all on building golf courses — golf courses on which theoretically zero percent of the Chinese populace plays. But, in reality, the popularity of the sport there continues to grow.

That’s one of the crazy paradoxes explored by Dan Washburn in “The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream.” Washburn discussed his book Wednesday at the East-West Center.

As Washburn described China’s golf boom and then crackdown, it reminded me of those poker rooms in New York and the online version of the game. Prohibition also came to mind. Illegal, but everyone looked the other way … for a while, at least.

“There’s a lot of corruption in China and the story of golf there is emblematic of that,” Washburn said. “Golf became a target. The rich man’s game.”

The communists banned golf in 1949, but Washburn said courses were re-opened and built in the 1980s, “as a way to attract foreign business.” Still, only a few elite Chinese were supposed to play. Construction of new courses was banned in 2004, but enforcement was difficult — as it was of who was playing and who wasn’t playing.

“They would say, ‘The mountain is high and the emperor is far away,’” Washburn related. One question he tries to answer in his book is, “How can it be banned and booming at the same time?”

Through the stories of Zhou Xunshu, Wan Libo and Martin Moore, Washburn evocatively makes sense of the chaos that prevailed in golf’s development in China from the perspective of a security guard turned professional player, a man whose lychee farm is next to a resort course and a Floridian sent halfway around the world to build courses.

Hawaii ties into the story of Chinese golf. The Hawaii Tourism Authority has allocated $1.4 million to target 180,000 Chinese visitors to Hawaii each year. Chinese tourists are the biggest spenders in Hawaii by far: $394 per day, said Mike Story of the HTA.

Pacific Links International is a major player in Chinese golf tourism, led by Du Sha, a Chinese entrepreneur who is now a Canadian citizen.

The crackdown hasn’t hurt Pacific Links, with 11 of its more than 100 worldwide courses in China. But the overall reduction in courses there is sending more Chinese here for tee times.

Micah Kane is the COO of Pacific Links Hawaii, which includes Makaha Golf Club, Makaha Valley Country Club, Olomana Golf Club and Royal Hawaiian Golf Club.

He recently returned from Beijing where he signed up 4,000 well-heeled Chinese to play golf and spend money here. Kane — the Kamehameha Schools chairman and former Hawaiian Homelands boss — promises golf tourism will improve Hawaii’s economy without contributing to over-development.

That needs to be true. We’ve got our own land-use issues, and we have a lot less of it than does China.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. His blog is at hawaiiwarriorworld.com/quick-reads.