The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. By Dan Washburn.Oneworld; 316 pages; $18.99 and £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ZHOU XUNSHU came from a village so poor that the grown-ups tore down his primary school for the bricks. They did not know much about book-learning, but they knew good building materials when they saw them. As an adult Mr Zhou took a job as a security guard at a golf course in Guangzhou, though he had no idea what golf was. It was while standing guard that he learned about the game. He watched the players through his binoculars, observing their strategies, squinting to make out the numbers on their shiny clubs. He wished he could afford to play, too.

One day Mr Zhou’s bosses were testing some new drivers. “Can I have a try?” he piped up. People laughed at him—a security guard wants to put his rough hands on a club that would cost three months’ salary! But someone let him have a go and, to gasps of disbelief, he smashed the ball over the hill at the end of the driving range—dead straight. Mr Zhou was hooked.

Dan Washburn, a journalist who lived in China for a decade, uses golf as a barometer of change. Under Mao Zedong the sport was banned, like so many things that were decadent and fun. When the country began to open up under Deng Xiaoping, a few golf courses were allowed, to entertain foreign investors. As China grew richer, more and more locals wanted to try the sport. Suddenly more golf courses were being built in China than anywhere else, despite the fact that their construction was technically illegal.

For Mr Washburn golf is symbolic not only of China’s economic rise but also of “the less glamorous realities of a nation’s awkward and arduous evolution from developing to developed: corruption, environmental neglect, disputes over rural land rights and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor”.

He tackles these great themes indirectly, by interweaving the stories of three men whose lives were affected by the golf boom. One is Mr Zhou, whose rise from peasant to professional golfer is, as Mr Washburn puts it, “the stuff of movies”. Hugely talented but utterly skint, Mr Zhou struggled for years to make a living playing a rich man’s game. He travelled to tournaments on slow trains because he could not afford to fly and slept in sordid flophouses miles from the courses.

When he earned enough to buy a flat in Chongqing, he urged his parents to come and live with him. They would be able to rest after 60 years sweating in the fields, he said. Finally they agreed, and came and filled his flat with live roosters. But they were homesick for their dirty village. As soon as their son flew away for a tournament, they went home to their friends and their corn. Anecdotes like this bring China to life in a way that outlandish-but-true statistics—some 250m peasants have moved to Chinese cities—cannot.

The book’s other main characters are Martin Moore, an American who builds golf courses, and Wang Libo, a lychee farmer whose land is bulldozed to make way for one. Both tales are as gripping as they are revealing.

Mr Moore, a laid-back, outdoorsy southerner, knew nothing about China before he accepted a job in the remote city of Kunming. But he soon realised that he was not in Florida any more. The local mayor insisted that he join him for a booze-up and a public execution. Mr Moore watched drunkenly as two drug-smugglers were placed on a stool and shot. He couldn’t refuse this grisly hospitality because golf-course-developers cannot operate without friends in government.

The tycoons Mr Moore worked for were as ambitious as they were tough. One course was never enough—they wanted ten, or even 36. They wanted the biggest and most opulent golf resorts in the world, and they wanted them built “faster, faster, FASTER”. Every step required bribes for officials to look the other way. When the central government cracked down, Mr Moore’s workers had to fill in bunkers and pretend that the project was something other than a golf course.

Many new courses appeared to make no economic sense—the owners couldn’t plausibly recoup their costs by charging green fees. Mr Washburn explains that golf was often a marketing tool to sell luxury villas nearby. Many Chinese officials have heaps of cash and no easy way to invest it, especially if it has been illicitly earned. Buying property is considered both prestigious and a safe investment, even though China’s property market swings more wildly than a drunk golfer.

The victims of China’s golf boom are the same people who suffer from other mega-developments: the peasants. When well-connected developers bulldoze villages, the inhabitants are compensated, but they do not get a choice. Mr Washburn describes peasants who rioted after receiving barely a tenth of the payout to which they were entitled. Their protest earned them only tear gas and jail.

That said, Chinese peasants are hardly passive in the face of injustice. Of the 187,000 mass protests that the Chinese government admits occurred in 2010, two-thirds were over land grabs. Some villagers use trickery to boost their compensation—when rumours spread that a new golf course is to be built, phoney graves suddenly pop up on the site, since developers must pay for each one they move.

Mr Wang fared better than many. Realising that he could not fight the Communist Party, he took the cash for his land and opened a shop to sell cigarettes and drinks to the construction workers building a golf resort. “Everything is possible”, he tells Mr Washburn, “if you have money.”