About
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and researcher based in Berlin. He is also the founder and director of the China Unofficial Archives, a repository for hundreds of books, samizdat magazines, and underground films banned in China.
His latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, shows how–despite the best efforts of Xi Jinping’s surveillance state–a nationwide movement has coalesced to challenge the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.
Work Experience
Johnson lived in China for more than 20 years and has been following the country since first going there as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985. He also studied Chinese in Taipei from 1986 to 1988, translating articles from mainland newspapers for a mainland monitoring service, and traveling widely around the country.
He worked as a newspaper correspondent in China from 1994 to 1996 with Baltimore’s The Sun, and from 1997 to 2001 with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered macro economics, China’s WTO accession and social issues, such as the rise of popular religion and the Falun Gong crackdown. During this time also volunteered for a U.S. registered charity, The Taoist Restoration Society, which brought him into close contact with China’s only indigenous religion.
In 2009, Johnson returned to China, living there until 2020 when he was expelled from China as part of worsening tensions between China and the United States. He wrote regularly for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He taught undergraduates at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, and served as an advisor to The Journal of Asian Studies.
From 2021 to 2024 he was a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He wrote extensively for cfr.org, briefed members of Congress and their staff on China, drafted position papers, and organized conferences.
He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Leipzig on Chinese religious associations and continues to write for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications.
He has worked in Germany twice as a foreign correspondent. From 1988 to 1992 he attended graduate school in West Berlin and covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. In 2001 he moved back to Berlin, working until 2009 as The Wall Street Journal‘s Germany bureau chief and senior writer. He managed reporters covering EU fiscal policy, such as the introduction of the euro, and macro-economics. He led a team of reporters investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks and wrote about social issues such as Islamist terrorism in Europe.
Awards and Fellowships
Johnson has won several prizes for writing, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China, two awards from the Overseas Press Club, an award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and Stanford University’s Shorenstein Journalism Award for his body of work covering Asia. In 2019 he won the American Academy of Religion’s “best in-depth newswriting” award. In 2025, he won the Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Book Reviewing for his 4000-word essay in the New York Review of Book on a new biography of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, and how the West underestimates the existence of independent Chinese thought.
In 2006-07 he spent a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and later received research and writing grants from the Open Society Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 2020, he was an inaugural grantee of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for work-in-progress. He was also awarded a 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship for a new book he is writing on China’s unofficial history.
For the 2024-2025 academic year he was a resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin ( Institute for Advanced Studies), where he worked on a book about Chinese religious associations and civil society.
Johnson has published four books and contributed chapters to four others. In addition to Sparks, his other books explore China’s religious revival and its political implications (The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, 2017), civil society and grassroots protest in China (Wild Grass, 2004) and Islamism and the Cold War in Europe (A Mosque in Munich, 2010).
He has also contributed chapters to: My First Trip to China (2011), Chinese Characters (2012), the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China(2016), and wrote a 5,000-word introduction to The Forbidden City: The Palace at the Heart of Chinese Culture (2021).
Johnson was born in Montréal, Canada. He holds U.S. and Canadian citizenship, and is a permanent resident of Germany.