Story by Clifton Evers and Yuzhu Peng

Inner Mongolia is as far away from the ocean as it sounds. And not much happens in Tungliyo Hot. If a local kid hears about surfing there’s no use waiting around for Kelly Slater to come and build one of his wavepools. A surfer in waiting must cross the windswept steppes to follow their dreams.

Tie Zhuang - known to his friends as TZ - is from Tungliyo Hot and he wasn't going to wait around. He was smart enough to know that even if the wavepool did come, surfing artificial waves are arguably a poor imitation of surfing in the ocean, so he headed to China's surfing capital: Hainan Island in the South China Sea.

TZ styling in home waters

TZ began his time on Hainan helping his brother look after some camels. Tourists pay to sit on these handsome creatures and ride them into the sunset. Don't go kidding yourself the job was easy. While the camels are affectionate, cheeky, and endlessly interesting, the tourists sitting atop them tend towards the opposite.

The waves on Hainan are perfect for learning: soft, gently sloping, and long. It's also warm for most of the year. Down on Hainan TZ got good, quick. Before long you could find him hanging about the Bay, eyes peering out from under his ever-present pork pie hat. Any man who can carry off that type of hat goes to the top of the style list, while any man who wears a surf-logoed baseball cap with the bill facing front or, god-forbid, back, goes straight to the bottom.

We know that. You know that. TZ knows that.

On any given day TZ is the best local surfer out at Riyuewan. A few international friends have hooked TZ up with boards and helped him get to Australia for the Noosa Festival of Surfing. Also, Li Hao, the CEO of REnextop, a platform promoting action sports, has teamed up with TZ. These relationships are all about getting in on the ground floor in the hope that surfing grows in China. It will grow, but how fast and how much is still up for debate. It may be tempting to think that a Chinese team in the Olympics will help, but Olympic legacy doesn’t necessarily increase necessarily sport participation. If it does it tends to be among an already privileged few.

Not too cool to compete: TZ throws the toes over in Hainan (left) and at the Noosa Festival of Surfing

Chinese officials in some areas of China, such as on Hainan Island, recognise surfing as an opportunity for them to increase tourism. The Chinese central government is funding training of a team for the Olympics. Others, well, they'll go so far as to take a chunk out of your surfboard if you slide into a designated swimming area. Clearly there’s a way to go in terms of recognising surfing.

If surfing is gonna grow in China the industry needs the urban middle class kids and young adults to get on board. As a group they have reaped enormous benefits from the remarkable economic growth and one-child policy of the post-reform era. They enjoy consumer products and cultural goods that cultivate their xiaozi-ness. Xiaozi is an urban Chinese concept which can refer to both a set of tastes and lifestyle attitudes, and a social group that defines itself through these tastes, lifestyles, and through consumption. By practising a Xiaozi lifestyle, young urban Chinese distance themselves from the rest of Chinese society, they consume brands, products, and activities such as surfing, that provide a bridge to experience the 'new'. The effect is to set themselves apart from the older generation and, somewhat ironically, underscore their individualism in a collectivist culture.

Mixing it up on a shortboard in the Philippines

The complication is that families and the young people are currently getting squeezed by a cooling economy. Disposable income is shrinking, and the social expectations for adulthood are ever-more pressing: young men are expected to have a car, property, and a successful career before being considered for marriage, while for women there is pressure to get married before becoming a 'leftover' woman or sheng nu. In other words, there are some hefty tensions between pursuing Xiaozi-ness through surfing rather than, say, dining out at international restaurants or engaging in conspicuous consumption of already well-known luxury brands.