Golf Books #207 (The Forbidden Game)

It’s still known as the “rich man’s game” and considered taboo, and yet golf is booming in China — hundreds of new courses have opened in the past decade, despite it being illegal for anyone to build them. Award-winning journalist Dan Washburn follows the lives of three men intimately involved in China’s bizarre golf scene.

We meet Zhou, a peasant turned golf pro who sees the game as his way into China’s new middle class; Wang, a lychee farmer whose life is transformed when a massive, top-secret resort springs up next door; and Martin, a Western executive maneuvering through a highly political business environment, ever watchful for Beijing’s “golf police.”

Charting these three different paths to the new Chinese Dream, The Forbidden Game is a rich and arresting portrait of a country of contradictions.

Publication date: August 9, 2016 (source)

About the Author

Dan Washburn is an award-winning reporter and managing editor at the Asia Society. His writing has appeared in the FT Weekend Magazine, the Atlantic, The Economist, ESPN.com, Foreign Policy, Golf World, Slate, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. He is also the founding editor of Shanghaiist.com, one of the most widely read English-language websites about China. After almost a decade spent living in China, he now lives in Brooklyn, NY.