Chloe Calmon, Brazilian pro surfer, during the last Surfing Hainan Open in Riyue Bay, Wanning. Photo courtesy of Chinasurfreport.
Surfing has come to China and won’t ever leave. When I arrived in China, it was 2005 and the country was really much different from now, especially the people. During these years of frenetic economical development, many got rich, many left, but some were illuminated while discovering stoke.
It was a freezing night in Tianjin, one of the biggest ports in the whole country, only 30 minutes to Peking by a train that runs more than 310 km/hour. There are industries, grey skies, strong north winds coming from Siberia and, during the spring season, sand storms. Tianjin, Peking and Hebei Province are not exactly the places you should stay to live a healthy and happy marine life with your family, your kids and maybe your dog running on the beach.
It was a freezing cold winter night when I decided to change my life and follow the stoke. Go south, go surfing! I did it.
Living in China for almost ten years, marrying a Chinese beauty, I have been continuously trying to decrypt the Chinese mind and culture and understand their thoughts, hopes and necessities. After 40 years of strong, intense economical boom, after a cultural revolution and the following destruction of their past, their cultural heritage, flattening of the entire society, loss of traditional values and exploitation of natural resources for economic growth, I realized China needed a new positive energy and positive creed. Things that could have been conveyed by the stoke of surfing. That night, I decided to create the first surfing magazine in the history of China – CSR Chinasurfreport.
In less than two weeks, I quit my job, packed my stuff and my family and moved south. Destination: Hainan–the same island I had been to in 2005 looking for tropical feelings and waves to ride. The same place I went on holiday few years before would soon become a new home, CSR headquarters and ideal place for teaching surfing, following the lead of Californian Brendan Sheridan–the first to open a surf shop ever in China.
After arriving here, I immediately started to work on the project, but nothing was ready and everything had to be done. The first step was to gather information about local communities from the people and lifeguards on the beaches and from the few local surfers living between the cold, crowded city of Qingdao, in the Shandong province, and Sanya, the southern most city of China, in the tropical island of Hainan.
An intense and feverish period of work started and brought us to where we are now. Many seeds have already been planted. Surfing can help young Chinese people to rediscover their true love for nature and the ocean.
Kassia Meador at Riyue Bay. Photo courtesy of Chinasurfreport.
CSR, already an official partner with ASP and ISA for events in China, offers the most important news in Chinese and English, about the local and international surfing scenes. We also promote surfing history through interviews with legends Bruce Brown, Kemp Aaberg and ASP General Manager Dane Jordan and by explaining who Duke Kahanamoku or Tom Blake were and so on. Long is the journey, and a lot must still be done.
Fortunately, we haven’t been the only one to work on this path. The Chinese Government had the same idea and decided to transform China into an internationally known destination for tourism and, in particular, developing Hainan as a high-level surfing destination. Hainan is a beautiful tropical island between Vietnam and Philippines, exactly in the route of Asiatic typhoons. This means swells of extraordinary consistency. The headquarters of ASP noticed this potential and started to organize the Men’s and Women’s Longboard World Championships final events in Riyue Bay, a really nice left point beach on the east coast of the island. Every year, the ISA brings all the best national teams of the world to attend the ISA China Cup in our clear waters in the embrace of the warm sun rays of Hainan.
Surfing in China, with its 14,500 km of coastline on the Pacific Ocean, is not only Hainan. A population of 1.4 billion people is the next market for the surfing industry. Many companies have started to invest in events, surf shops, skate and snow parks, all across the country. Surfing in China will definitely surprise those who didn’t believe in its quality as more eyes are brought to our coastline. There’s more here than you know. Aloha China!
Learn more about China’s surf community and China Surf Report here.
