Head East, Young Men (and Women)
We’re pretty dame liberal with the use of the word “frontier” when we talk about surfing. We wax on about big-wave frontiers, aerial frontiers, and new frontiers in female surfing on a monthly basis at this magazine alone. Truth be told, it’s all a lot of hyperbole, something to whet your palette and hook you into feature. But I’m about to hit you with some literal next world stuff here—an all caps, honest FRONTIER.
Here’s surfing’s future: China. And I’m not talking about the Middle Kingdom in terms of shaping being outsourced or your trunks being stitched. This isn’t about China as a producer, but China as a consumer.
Like the rest of the world, surfing is casting a wry grin toward our Eastern neighbor, cash signs for eyeballs, ka-ching noises coming out of our collective mouths and all. In addition to the countless storefronts peddling Quik trunks, Rip Curl watches, and Billabong jeans across the growing Eastern powerhouse, organized competitive surfing just made inroads there as well. And that, dear reader, is a major-1.3-billion-people-strong frontier.
This past October, the ASP Women’s World Longboard Tour held their first heats in the country. With more than 9,000 miles of coastline it was only a matter of time before the ASP, like every other company looking to do business in China, planted surfing’s competitive flag in the ground. But like most things that seem to be happening in communist China, it didn’t happen completely seamlessly.
Leading up to the event, the Women’s World Longboard Tour and the ASP found itself mired in controversy as they prepared to head east. The reigning world champ at the time, Cori Schumacher, had publicly announced that she was boycotting the contest due to the government’s checkered history. “I have deep political and personal reservations with being a part of any sort of benefit to a country that actively engages in human rights violations,” Schumacher said. And with that, politics reared its head as proponents and opponents to opening up professional surfing to the country battled it out online. But at the end of the day, the contest proceeded as scheduled and went off without a hitch, undoubtedly paving the way for future ASP venues.
So where does this leave us? What does this great Chinese frontier entail? Depending on whom you talk to, it could mean a greener (think money, not trees) future. But if the past is any indication of the future (in the 1980s, a number of top-tier surfers boycotted South Africa due to apartheid) the ASP’s new roots in China have the potential to bear bitter fruit with politically minded World Tour surfers.
All of this should yield the revelation that, for better or worse, surfing as a whole is on the cusp of a monumental moment. Surfing is flocking to China. And the Chinese will flock to surfing. Granted it’s about as cliché as they get, but if surfing truly is a tribe, you can bet on one thing as we open up to China: our tribe is about to get a whole lot bigger. —Jeff Mull
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