Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Canadian-born American journalist and independent writer known for his long-time reporting and a series of books on China and Germany. His Chinese name is Zhang Yan (張彦).[1] Johnson writes regularly for The New York Review of Books[2] and The New York Times,[3] and The Wall Street Journal.
In 2020, Johnson's journalist visa was canceled amid US-China tensions over
trade and the
COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China.[7] He currently lives in New York, where he is Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations.[8]
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.[9] 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.[citation needed]
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]
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.[12]
Johnson left the Wall Street Journal in 2010 to pursue magazine and book writing on cultural and social affairs.[13] In 2010, Johnson published A Mosque in Munich, a book about the rise of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.[14] He conducted research on the book while on a Nieman fellowship at
Harvard University.[15]
He has published chapters in three other books: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China,Chinese Characters, and My First Trip to China.[20]
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,[21] including whistleblowers of the
COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
He attended the
University of Florida, where he studied Asian Studies and Journalism.[22] He obtained his master's degree in Sinology from the
Free University of Berlin.[23] He is currently pursuing a PhD focused on Chinese religious associations at
Leipzig University.[24] In April 2022 he re-entered China for a visit, describing it in a Foreign Affairs article as having entered an "age of stagnation."
[1]
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.]