Ian Johnson (writer)

Ian Johnson
Born	27 July 1962 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Education	University of Florida, Free University of Berlin, Harvard University,
Occupation(s)	Pulitzer Prize winning Reporter and Journalist
Website	www.ian-johnson.com

Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Beijing-based writer and independent scholar. His Chinese name is Zhang Yan (張彦).

Johnson writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and gives speeches on China in Europe and North America.

He also teaches university courses at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, is a past associate editor of The Journal of Asian Studies.

Johnson won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. His reporting from China was also honored in 2001 by the Overseas Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2017 he won Stanford University's Shorenstein Prize for his body of work covering Asia. In 2019 he won the American Academy of Religion's "best in-depth newswriting" award.

In 2020, Johnson's journalist visa was canceled amid US-China tensions over trade and the COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China.

Life and work

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalized United States citizen who has been living in Beijing, China, for more than twenty years.

He first visited China as a student in 1984 and later studied Chinese in Taiwan. From 1994 to 1997 he worked in Beijing for The Baltimore Sun and from 1997 to 2001 for The Wall Street Journal. After working in Berlin, Germany, for nearly eight years he returned to China in 2009.

In 2004, Johnson published Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Pantheon) on grassroots efforts to form civil society. It was later released in paperback and has been translated into several languages.

In 2010, Johnson published A Mosque in Munich, a book about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. He conducted research on the book while on a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University.

In 2017, he published The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao about China's search for meaning and values. It included a 100-page profile of Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu and its pastor Wang Yi (pastor) who was arrested in 2018 for incitement to subvert state power. It also included one of the last in-depth interviews with the popular Chinese spiritual leader Nan Huai-Chin as well as research on Xi Jinping's support for traditional religions, especially Buddhism, when he was head of Zhengding County in the 1980s.

The Souls of China was voted one of the best books of the year by The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor.

He has also published chapters in three other books: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, Chinese Characters, and My First Trip to China.

He attended the University of Florida, where he studied Asian Studies and Journalism Nieman Watchdog > About Us > Contributor > Ian Johnson. He obtained his master's degree in Sinology from the Free University of Berlin.

On February 9, 2006, Johnson delivered congressional testimony on the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. He described the Brotherhood as "an umbrella group that regularly lobbies major international institutions like the EU and the Vatican" and "controls some of the most dynamic, politically active Muslim groups in key European countries, such as Britain, France and Germany." He said the group has schools "to train imams," has funded a "mechanism in the guise of a UK-registered charity," and has a fatwa council to enforce ideological conformity.

Johnson left the Wall Street Journal in 2010 to pursue magazine and book writing on cultural and social affairs.

Bibliography

Books

• Johnson, Ian (2004). Wild grass : three stories of change in modern China. New York: Pantheon Books.
• — (2010). A mosque in Munich : Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• — (2017). The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 9781101870051.

Essays and reporting

• Ex-Colony Weihai Ponders What Might Have Been, Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1997
• Can't We All Just Get Along? Are European Muslims Islam's best hope?, Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2004
• In China, Grass-Roots Groups Stretch Limits on Activism, Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2008
• "Will the Chinese be supreme?", New York Review of Books, 04.04.2013 Will the Chinese Be Supreme?
• Johnson, Ian (April 22, 2013). "Studio city : in a remote spot in China, the world's biggest movie lot is getting even bigger". Onward and Upward with the Arts. The New Yorker. 89 (10): 48–55. Profile of Hengdian World Studios.
• — (December 2, 2013). "In the air : discontent grows in Chinas most polluted cities". Letter from Handan. The New Yorker. 89 (39): 32–37.
• — (February 3, 2014). "Class consciousness : China's new bourgeoisie discovers alternative education". Letter from Chengdu. The New Yorker. 89 (47): 34–39.
• Ian Johnson, "What Holds China Together?", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 14 (26 September 2019), pp. 14, 16, 18. "The Manchus... had [in 1644] conquered the last ethnic Chinese empire, the Ming [and established Imperial China's last dynasty, the Qing]... The Manchus expanded the empire's borders northward to include all of Mongolia, and westward to Tibet and Xinjiang." [p. 16.] "China's rulers have no faith that anything but force can keep this sprawling country intact." [p. 18.]

External links

• Ian Johnson (2001) Pulitzer Prize winning articles in the Wall Street Journal
• Ian Johnson (website)
• "Nieman Watchdog > About Us > Contributor > Ian Johnson". niemanwatchdog.org.
• Language Wars, from Montreal to Beijing