Skiing: One Boom China Can't Sustain

The Chinese have adopted any number of Western status symbols—cars, clothes, little dogs—but skiing isn’t one, to the tremendous disappointment of developers who made huge bets on the country’s first winter-sports resorts. The $140 million Yabuli International extravaganza opened last year near northeastern Harbin, but, as a Telegraph reporter’s fellow skier asks, “Where is everyone?”

“I’m sure there will come a moment in China when skiing explodes, but if you had asked me in 2004 ‘when’ that moment would come, I’d have said ‘2006,’” says an Italian investor in another resort, echoing Chinese predictions that 20 million will visit ski resorts by 2014—though only about 2 million do now, not the 5 million authorities would have you believe. “If you’d asked me again in 2006, I’d have said ‘2010,’ but it just hasn’t happened.”
(More China stories.)