Dan Washburn is Managing Editor at Asia Society in New York. He is currently working on a book about the development of golf in China for Oneworld Publications in London. From 2002 to 2011, Dan worked as a freelance writer based out of Shanghai. His work has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Economist, ESPN.com, Golf World, Golf Digest, and other publications. In 2005, he founded the popular website Shanghaiist.com.

Last Updated: May 2, 2014

Sinica Podcast

11.22.14

Banned but Booming: Golf in China

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
Despite China's legal moratorium on the development of the golf industry, a policy driven by concerns over illegal farmland seizures and the potential misallocation of agricultural land and water resources, the golf industry has experienced an...

Books

07.15.14

The Forbidden Game

Dan Washburn
In China, just because something is banned, doesn't mean it can't boom. 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 a vivid path through this contradictory country by following the lives of three men intimately involved in China'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 at one of the new, exclusive clubs and who sees himself entering the emerging Chinese middle class as a result; Wang, a lychee farmer whose life is turned upside down when a massive, top-secret golf resort moves in next door to his tiny village; and Martin, a Western executive maneuvering through China’s byzantine and highly political business environment, ever watchful for Beijing's "golf police." The Forbidden Game is a rich and arresting portrait of the world’s newest superpower and three different paths to the new Chinese Dream. —Oneworld Publications {chop}

Excerpts

05.29.13

Every Thousand Years

Dan Washburn
There are no guardrails on the road to Qixin. And there is only one other way to the top of the mountain—a four-hour hike. It was February, and the ice and snow from Guizhou’s winter storms had recently melted, leaving the famously treacherous cliff...

Recommended Links

China’s Complicated Relationship with Golf
By
Dan Washburn
via
Golf
07.01.14

Dan Washburn, managing editor of the Asia Society and author of the new book “The Forbidden Game,” tells Jessica Marksbury that golf in China is both banned and booming.

Topics: Politics, Society