Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history.
He was a 2024-2025 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he is writing a new book on China. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and regularly speaks in the media or to public audiences about China.
He is the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films. This website is a registered (501c3) non-profit that uploads and annotates new movies and publications daily.
His newest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. See the book’s page for reviews, tours, and other information. The book was included on five “best of 2023” lists by publications such as The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Financial Times.
Johnson is best known for his reporting from grassroots China, with projects usually taking years of on-the-ground research to complete. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a Public Scholar grant; a solo Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China; Stanford University’s Shorenstein prize for his body of work on Asia; a grant from the Open Society Foundation; a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University; the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news writing; and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation grant for work-in-progress.
Please feel free to explore this site to learn more about his projects, books, articles, biography, as well as public speaking appearances.
