The Financial Times acquired Danwei in 2013. In 2009, shortly after Goldkorn opened a consulting business in Beijing to operate the website, the site was blocked, and the company pivoted to providing commercial research services. Jeremy Goldkorn is the founder and director of Danwei, a research firm which began life in 2003 as a website and blog that translated and analyzed Chinese media, Internet, government regulation, and censorship. After almost a decade in China, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Bliss and their dogs Ozzie and Tux. Dan is also the founding editor of, one of the most widely read English-language websites about China. His work has been featured in the anthologies Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China and Inside the Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On. His writing has appeared in FT Weekend Magazine, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Economist, Golf World, Golf Digest,, The Telegraph, Quartz, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. We meet Zhou, a peasant-turned-golf-pro who discovered the game after winning a job as a security guard at an exclusive golf club – and believes golf to be his ticket to joining China’s emerging middle class Wang, a lychee farmer whose life is turned upside down when a massive top-secret golf complex moves in next door to his tiny ancient village and Martin, a Western executive trying to navigate China’s byzantine and highly political business environment, 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.ĭan Washburn is an award-winning journalist and Chief Content Officer at the Asia Society. 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. Statistically, zero percent of the Chinese population plays golf, a politically taboo topic still known as the “rich man’s game.” Yet China is in the midst of a golf boom – hundreds of new courses have opened in the past decade, despite it being illegal to build them. Dan will appear in conversation with Jeremy Goldkorn. Please join Parnassus Books in welcoming author Dan Washburn for a discussion and signing of his book, The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream.