# Ian Johnson (writer)

Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Canadian-born American journalist known for his long-time reporting and a series of books on China and Germany. His Chinese name is Zhang Yan (張彦). Johnson writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Johnson won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in the Wall Street Journal 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 U.S.-China tensions over trade and the COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China. He currently lives in New York, where he is Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

## Early life and education

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalized United States citizen who lived in Beijing for over twenty years. He attended Chamberlain High School in Tampa, Florida. He studied Asian studies and journalism at the University of Florida, where he . He first visited China as a student in 1984 and later studied Chinese in Taiwan. He obtained a MA in Sinology from the Free University of Berlin. He is currently pursuing a PhD focused on Chinese religious associations at Leipzig University.

## Career

From 1994 to 1997, Johnson 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.
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. 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 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 published chapters in three other books: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, Chinese Characters, and My First Trip to China.
His book Sparks: China's Underground Historians was published in September 2023, and follows various "counter-historians" and dissident figures from China's past and present, including whistleblowers of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
In April 2022 he re-entered China for a visit, describing it in a Foreign Affairs article as having entered an "age of stagnation."