Statistically, zero percent of the Chinese population plays golf, still known as the 'rich man's game' and considered taboo. Yet China is in the midst of a golf boom - hundreds of new courses have opened in the past decade, despite it being illegal for anyone to build them. Award-winning journalist Dan Washburn charts China's economic and political fortunes through the lives of three men intimately involved in the country's bizarre golf scene. We meet Zhou, a peasant turned golf pro who discovered the game when he won a job as a security guard on one of the massive construction sites and who sees the game as his key to the emerging Chinese middle class; Wang, a lychee farmer whose land is confiscated for an 'ecological park' and resorts to setting up a food kiosk on a nearby track; and Bill, a Western executive manoeuvring through China's byzantine bureaucracy (as well as Thai gangs), ever watchful for Beijing's 'golf police'. The Forbidden Game is a rich and engrossing portrait of the world's newest superpower, and three very different paths to the 'Chinese Dream'.