Ian Johnson (writer)

Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Beijing-based writer and independent scholar. His Chinese name is Zhang Yan (張彦).[1]

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

Johnson writes regularly for The New York Review of Books[2] and The New York Times,[3] and gives speeches on China in Europe and North America.[4]

He also teaches university courses at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies,[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] In 2019 he won the American Academy of Religion's "best in-depth newswriting" award.[8]

In 2020, Johnson's journalist visa was canceled amid US-China tensions over trade and the COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China.[9]

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[10] 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.[11]

In 2010, Johnson published A Mosque in Munich, a book about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.[12] He conducted research on the book while on a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University.[13]

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.[14] 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.[15]

The Souls of China was voted one of the best books of the year by The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor.[16][17]

He has also published chapters in three other books: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, Chinese Characters, and My First Trip to China.[18]

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.[19]

Johnson left the Wall Street Journal in 2010 to pursue magazine and book writing on cultural and social affairs.[20]

Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Books
Library resources
By Ian Johnson (writer)
  • 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

References
  1. "List of Chinese names of western scholars". home.uni-leipzig.de. 2017. Retrieved 2019-12-22.
  2. "Ian Johnson". The New York Review of Books.
  3. "Ian Johnson - The New York Times". www.nytimes.com.
  4. "Speaking and Media Appearances - Ian Johnson". www.ian-johnson.com.
  5. "Ian Johnson 张彦".
  6. Ian Johnson (2001) Pulitzer Prize winning articles in the Wall Street Journal
  7. "FSI | Shorenstein APARC - Ian Johnson, longtime foreign correspondent, to receive Shorenstein Journalism Award". aparc.fsi.stanford.edu.
  8. "AAR Announces Winners of 2019 Best In-Depth Newswriting on Religion Contest | aarweb.org". www.aarweb.org.
  9. "Kicked Out of China, and Other Real-Life Costs of a Geopolitical Meltdown". www.nytimes.com.
  10. "Deng's Heyday". ChinaFile. September 10, 2011.
  11. "Wild Grass - Ian Johnson". www.ian-johnson.com.
  12. "A Mosque in Munich - Ian Johnson". www.ian-johnson.com.
  13. "Ian Johnson on A Mosque in Munich: narrative as "the sugar around the medicine"". Nieman Foundation.
  14. Johnson, Ian (March 25, 2019). "This Chinese Christian Was Charged With Trying to Subvert the State". The New York Times.
  15. Johnson, Ian (September 29, 2012). "Aiming for Top, Xi Forged Ties Early in China". The New York Times.
  16. "Books of the Year 2017". December 9, 2017 – via The Economist.
  17. "30 best books of 2017". Christian Science Monitor. December 4, 2017.
  18. "Books - Ian Johnson". www.ian-johnson.com.
  19. Muslim Brotherhood in Europe Archived 2007-07-03 at the Wayback Machine, February 9, 2006, Ian Johnson, Congressional Testimony - published with the AIFD
  20. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2013-01-13. Retrieved 2013-04-07.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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