If you’re reading this, and you’re an elite leader in China’s Communist Party (one of 88 million people) you can toss your golf clubs in the trash, because your president — Xi Jinping — just made it illegal for you to be part of a golf club/play the old Scottish game.

According to the Washington Post, it was included in a list of vices in an eight-article moral and ethical code published by the country’s top TOP chiefs — a committee of 25 guys — in an effort to clean things up in the beleaguered party.

The other sins were gluttony (both drink and food) and having “improper sexual relations with others” — whatever that means.

As it turns out, the game of golf has been seen as an evil ever since the old communist days of Mao Zedong. He got rid of all of them when he led the country and even ripped up a classic course in Shanghai and made it into a zoo.

But after Chairman Mao left, the golf came back into the country’s good graces, and some of the course reconstruction was helped along by old American golf legend and beverage icon Arnold Palmer. Lately, however — in the past decade or so — the tide turned back against putting and driving and chipping, with negative propaganda pieces sprouting up in the various government-guided Chinese media publications.

This from the Post:

In 2009, the Guang Ming Daily, a state-run newspaper, called the game “green opium” and warned that officials were too addicted to playing golf to fulfill their duties.

In June, the People’s Daily published an opinion piece calling golf “a kind of elegant bribery.” It went on to suggest some other, more acceptable, ways for rich people to do business and make friends, such as equestrianism, with its reputation for “British style and lordliness,” as well as luxury cruises and private wine-tasting parties.

Perhaps the fact that the game’s most cherished satirical soliloquy rhapsodizes the Communist Party of China’s most hated and famous exile/outlaw, the Dalai Lama, has something to do with the loathing?

Seriously though? Talk about about sporting hypocrite …

Here’s President Xi with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Premier League player Sergio Agüero before a recent Manchester City FC game: