The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream

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.