Close to the center of Dongguan, the Hillview golf resort features 36 holes designed by American Jim Engh. The four nines are labeled A, B, C and D, with the first two built in 1998, save for holes 4 to 7 which were added in 2012 after the A nine had to be reshuffled to accommodate a new government road.

This A Course has floodlights and plenty of dramatic high-risk, small-reward design elements that don’t really make much golfing sense but are sure to appeal to a certain demographic of player. True of all four nines, in too many places the A & B (Open Course) feel like a try-hard PGA West meets the 18^th hole at Cypress Point. There are mounds everywhere here and some crazy narrow fairways, such as the 13^th and 15^th, with trees set right in their middle. As with many Engh courses, a tonne of material had to shifted to build the holes, and little effort was made to disguise where that shaping occurred. The final few holes aren’t offensive, but overall this is neither an interesting nor a particularly memorable golf course.

The newer Masters course (C & D) was built in 2004 and is both more popular and certainly better than the older version. The same excess of mounding can be found here, but with even more severity around some of the greens. Engh has a habit of adding small, penal back tiers to some his greens and then having them slope away from the approaching golfer. There are some that must be next to impossible for the locals when pins are pushed right to the back. The par five 17^th has one such back ledge as do several earlier holes including the crazy tough par three 5^th with its sunken rear section and the otherwise solid mid-length 10^th.

The number of greens framed by large mounds here is repetitive, and reminiscent of Engh’s work at The Club at Black Rock in Idaho, where golfers are constantly asked to throw the ball up into elevated greens with large symmetrical mounds as their backstop. You sometimes wonder with architects, and certainly a guy like Jim Engh, whether they really understand the game of golf, or here whether they understand the Chinese golf culture, because the average Chinese player would find this torturously difficult and no fun at all unless engaged in serious betting matches with friends.

Unlike many other courses in China, which are hard for beginners and easy for skilled golfers, this one is just plain tough for everybody. That said, there are much better holes here than on the Open Course and some nice areas for golf. The duneside green on the 16^th, for example, and consecutive mid-length par fours at the 7^th and 8^th work reasonably well. The built up fairways are mostly horrifically narrow but they do offer enough visual appeal to interest some well-traveled golfers. The par threes are mostly nice to look at although they are exceedingly difficult when pins are tucked, or pushed back in the case of the aforementioned 5^th hole, whose triple-decker green falls twice to lower pinnable levels that in each case is more outrageous than the previous (higher) tier.

Engh’s use of mounds, tiers through greens, round grass-faced pot bunkers and deep trench traps seems primarily aimed at making a big aesthetic statement. Unfortunately there aren't many strategic areas here and it's mostly about artificiality and testing execution. The course will unquestionably appeal to those who like their shapes big and round and their golf extremely difficult. For the rest, however, there is little to love about the Hillview resort.