Ian Johnson (writer) (Redirected from Ian Denis Johnson)

Ian Johnson
Born27 July 1962
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
EducationUniversity of Florida, Free University of Berlin, Harvard University,
Occupation(s)Pulitzer Prize winning Reporter
and Journalist
Websitewww.ian-johnson.com

Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Canadian-born American writer and independent scholar 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 US-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.

Life and work

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalized United States citizen who lived in Beijing, China, for more than twenty years. He attended Chamberlain High School in Tampa, Florida. 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 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 will be published in September 2022, and follows various "counter-historians" and dissident figures from China's past and present, including whistleblowers of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.

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

Essays and reporting


This page was last updated at 2023-08-07 08:59 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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