The C.G.A.’s biggest gambit is an $80 million national golf training center inaugurated last year in Nanshan in Shandong Province, on China’s eastern coast. The facility, built to C.G.A. specifications by the Nanshan Group, a Chinese conglomerate, is meant to surpass the most advanced training centers in the West. Beyond the gimmicks — bunkers with four kinds of sand, colorful bushes shaped into the five Olympic rings — the center has several hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of the latest digital swing technology. So far, however, the machines are rarely used. A junior golf academy trains at the range, but the technology is reserved largely for the national teams, which convene there sporadically. “The equipment is like an X-ray machine,” says one coach. “You only need it once or twice per year.”

The city-level training facility at Shichahai, a converted boxing gym with seven artificial-turf golf mats and nets, has none of that sophistication. Five days a week, after taking morning classes, Luo and her teammates smash golf balls into nets; on weekends, they play on local courses. Their two Chinese coaches have little expertise: one is a young college graduate with a degree in golf-management studies, while the other is a former national taekwondo champion who, though fanatical about conditioning, confessed to me that he had never hit a golf ball before being assigned to the team last year. A foreign teaching pro comes once a month to give lessons, but it’s a different person each time. “We would like to have more consistent lessons with a foreign pro,” Luo’s father said. “But what option do we have?”

China’s junior-golf trailblazers, Guan Tianlang and Ye Wocheng, live two hours from each other in southern Guangdong Province. In some ways, Ye has been chasing his older rival from the moment he picked up his first golf club, by accident, at age 4. Left alone for a minute at a driving range, Ye tried to swing his father’s giant Callaway driver — and shattered it against a partition. “I was furious,” recalls his father, a construction-company boss. “That club cost me more than a thousand dollars.” The next day, he bought his son a set of small clubs and showed him a hitting net in a local golf shop. “Let him hit balls as long as he can,” he told the shop owner, “and give him a Coke only if he sweats.” Even at 4, Ye hit balls all afternoon until his face dripped with sweat.

The prizes for both boys would get only sweeter and more addictive. At 6, Guan was already winning trophies at local tournaments and preparing for his first competitions in the United States. His father and mother did not take him out of school, but they pulled back from their own businesses and invested all of their time — and part of their considerable wealth — into his career. Guan’s father was, and remains, his primary coach, but as the boy prepared for his first U.S. tournaments, he took lessons from Dan Webb, a Canadian teaching pro then based in Guangzhou. Guan had already been golfing for two years, Webb says, “and he could imitate the swings of four pros: Tiger, Furyk, Els, DiMarco.” The boy not only dressed like a pro, with primary-color pants hand-sewn by his mother, but he also had the preternatural calm of a tour veteran. “His real talent,” Webb says, “was his self-belief.”

Not all of China’s top juniors have perfect technique — indeed, Guan’s swing is considered flawed — but their mental strength and self-confidence set them apart. At the Masters, the 14-year-old Guan startled reporters when, in his soft voice, he pronounced: “I wish, one day, I can win all four majors in one year.” Nobody has won golf’s Grand Slam in a calendar year in the modern era, not even Woods. Guan’s statement was too innocent to be considered arrogant, but it did reflect the sky-is-the-limit ambitions of modern China.

Ye hasn’t lagged far behind Guan in achievements or self-confidence. He broke par when he was 8. By 9, he was winning most tournaments in his age group in China. But filling his family’s three-story house with junior trophies — more than 100 now line the bookshelves — was never the ultimate goal. Early on, watching a P.G.A. tournament on TV, Ye fixated on Woods — not because of his swing or personality but because he pulled off brilliant shots under pressure. “Even when I was 9,” Ye told me, “I was dreaming about being No. 1 in the world.”

Chinese families may be able to create perfect petri-dish conditions for incubating golf prodigies: discipline, focus, hard work, unwavering support. But creating a world-class golfer requires a deeper level of expertise than Ye’s local Chinese pro could offer. At a junior event in 2010, Ye and his father were introduced to David Watson, a veteran British touring pro who had become a sort of Pied Piper for top Chinese juniors. Standing 6-foot-5 and ramrod-straight, Watson fixed the 9-year-old with a hard look: “Are you willing to make a huge sacrifice to be the best?” Ye nodded. What started as a once-a-week lesson eventually became a full-time partnership (with Ye and another boy). And the results followed. Ye won the San Diego Junior Masters in 2010 and then repeated the feat in 2011. “You could see already,” Watson says, “that he was bred to play this game.”