What does class token mean? [on hold]

As in the topic:

What does class token exactly mean in in the following sentence?:

You may write a type followed by .class as a literal that denotes the class token corresponding to that type, and the method getClass is defined on every object and returns a class token that represents the reified type information carried by that object at run-time.

These words come from "Java Generics and Collections".

I only know more or less what does token mean in general from this source What does token mean?