Malnourished horses photographed last month at the Beijing Jockey Club. Inset: Kevin Connolly in the club's heydays in 2004. Photos: Gao Fumao

By Gao Fumao

The Beijing Jockey Club's grandstand is grandiose. But it remains an architect's model in a glass case, coated in dust in a corner of the club's boardroom in Tongzhou. And rather than filling the seats the masses are at the gates – literally.

In a rural pocket, one of the few left, of the northerly suburb of Tongzhou, villagers have picketed the gates of the 200 hectare racing establishment, opened eight years ago by YP Cheng, a Hong Kong manufacturing tycoon who saw another fortune in bringing horserac¬ing to China.

Where before there was a racing dream now there's bitterness, and hungry horses. Land that had been rented at 150 yuan ($22) per mu is now worth at least 400 yuan, say villagers.

The Jockey Club's Hong Kong owner won't budge. So in August they chained bicycles to the gates and laid siege in shifts of picketers who blocked supplies from entering the club for over a month. Thirty horses died of starva¬tion, explains club manager Kevin Connolly. He claims he was locked outside for weeks this autumn while his horses starved.

Rent fight

The picket was lifted in October when authorities promised villagers the issue would be resolved after the National Day festivities. Dozens of horses are slowly coming back to health but Connolly concedes some will always bear the marks of starvation, hip bones protrud¬ing through dun-colored skin.

The horses' health depends on the dispute between villagers and Cheng being resolved. Any resurgence in the dispute could spell the end of his China racing gamble. His winning depended on Beijing legalizing gambling, and it hasn't.

When the Jockey Club pushed the envelope, local authorities responded decisively in the late spring of 2005. There was no more gambling, and no more racing because, Connolly says, "putting on a race is an expensive business, and the club will only race if there's a return."

Tongzhou is no longer the backwater it was when the lease was signed in 1997. Soaring land prices have prompted the villagers to seek the return of their land, rented to the club in 1997. Behind the white perimeter walls, graf¬fitied now with villagers' protest slogans, Kevin Connolly oversees 1,750 thoroughbred horses in the hope that they'll race or breed.

Breeding represents the club's only earnings – Connolly sold 150 horses this year to Chinese buyers. The only horses which appear to have escaped the ordeal are the club's two dozen stal¬lions, champions purchased from the world's racing tracks by YP Cheng to create a progeny of competitive racers for the Tongzhou track.

But racing appears unlikely anytime soon. The reasons for legalizing gambling may be compelling: Hong Kong gets a quarter of its tax revenues from its Jockey Club, but the Chi¬nese mainland maintains a steadfast ban on gambling.

Man in the middle

Today the only non-Chinese on the site, Kevin Connolly has known plenty of the highs that go with racing. Brought up on the Cur¬ragh, the flat, green expanse of central Ireland that's produced more of the prize winning bloodstock than any territory across the globe. He trained horses there before moving to Australia. At the famed Domeland breeding center he met YP Cheng, who persuaded him to manage his bloodstock in Hong Kong and Macao, the world's most lucrative racetracks in betting takes.

A toy-making tycoon, Cheng, like most Hong Kong tycoons caught up in China's boom, saw a bigger bounty in the Chinese mainland. So in 1997 he rented 150 hectares in Tongzhou and shipped in 17 planeloads of some of the world's most expensive horses. Connolly and a staff of Australian trainers and vets were sent to mind them.

It was still the same dusty village but when I first visited in the spring of 2004 it was easy to be impressed by the scale of the Jockey Club. The buildings look like any Chinese ware¬house: white rectangular blocks hooded by blue steel-sheeted roofs, but there was a military regularity to the hive of activity that gripped the Club. Workmen and women pushed brushes, pulled wheelbarrows of hay and dung, polished leather tack, carried buckets of water.

Connolly was proud, and confident in the future, watching his jockeys, perched on horses galloping around the track. The course has three tracks, two for training. It was a Monday in February, right after Spring Festival and the jockeys were prepping their steeds for the start of the racing season, that March.

The racetrack seemed to be fulfilling its promise to the local economy, giving jobs and taking visitors into the community.

Connolly hinted at talks then about build¬ing a rail connection to the club to get punters to the track more easily. The villagers came to the club gates then to sell egg pancakes and bowls of soup to hungry punters who came to the weekly races held here, in the largest racing club in the Chinese mainland.

Locals who had rented their land to YP Cheng also account for most of the 1,000-work-er payroll that fed and tended the horses and weeded the 2-kilometer dirt racetrack.

Decay and hope

Today weeds and withering long grass choke the gates, the name remains, in yellow Chinese characters on a blue horseshoe-shaped arch which spells the club's name. Punters who once strolled under the arch were turned away in 2005 after local authorities told the Jockey Club its tack of punters "guessing" was gambling in all but name.

There's no doubting the villagers have a good case. These are not wealthy people. A couple dismounts a motorbike to tell how their land lies behind the Jockey Club walls. The local government did it, shouts a chubby faced Mr Li who sells electrical goods instead of vegetables. Officials, he said promised wealth and work for the villagers. The work came, for a while. But when the racing stopped the Jockey Club let people go, and there were no more weekend windfalls from selling food to race goers.

Kevin Connolly says the track could be spruced up and reopened "very quickly." The act of actually racing horses is not illegal.

Rather the act of taking money from the public in bets is. But, he adds, putting on a top race costs a lot of money, and the Jockey Club won't race till it can get the money back – in the form of bets.

The man in the middle, with his horses, Connolly says he believes in what the club is doing. He loves horses, like Cheng, whom he describes as "an animal lover." He claims to have enough fodder stockpiled to outlast a three-month siege.

Fields of scraggy-haired horses, this year's foals, last week clopped in the snow to feeding troughs loaded with Inner Mongolian hay. Staff poured millet into basins perched around the fences.

There's feed, for now. But the long-term future of these horses seems bound up in the legalization of on-track betting. There are faint signs of hopes from other parts of the country. Wuhan is running exploratory races (no gam¬bling): a supportive local government wants to see how local morals will adjust. All are efforts to be first movers if China does legalize on-course gambling.

Otherwise there's unlikely to be any racing clubs. The Tongzhou track was a brave bet that may or may not cash in for its Hong Kong owner.

While the racing manager Connolly appears dug in for a long wait-and-see, it's not clear his horses can wait. Bitter villagers aren't done. Last week a pile of rubble and soil was dumped near the gate. A new blockade may be im¬minent. Lets hope that doesn't mean hungry horses.

gaofumao@globaltimes.com.cn