ARTICLES
Gao Ertai: The desert flower that keeps blooming
“Some see in his critique of the Mao era parallels to today: the arbitrary rule of an aging leader, harsh treatment of dissent, and government programs that encourage people to inform on one another.” My profile of the octogenarian essayist Gao Ertai, who lived for years in the deserts o
New Work in an Old City
For the past three years I’ve been a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where I finished my book Sparks on dissent in today’s China, while also working on policy issues. It’s been a great experience: I got the chance to work with collegial, interesting thinkers
Podcasts and Oral History of China-Watching
One of the unpredictable aspects of writing is to see how interest develops over time. In the case of Sparks, it was published last year and I organized the usual tour, which you can see on the book’s tour page and review page. What I didn’t expect is that I’d still be approached a
From Toronto to San Diego: 2024 Talks
Sparks came out last September but I have a full plate of mostly public talks through the end of spring, 2024. The year starts out with talks at York University in Toronto and continues to Yale, Boston University (which made the poster above) and on to Washington, Seattle, Stanford, UC San Diego, Co
Best books of 2023
With 2023 almost over, five important publications have included Sparks on their “best of 2023” lists, including The New Yorker, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, and The Tablet. The New Yorker “With firm but never dogmatic moral conviction, Johnson pays
China Unofficial Archives launch
After months of work, on Dec. 13 we launched the China Unofficial Archives, a repository of hundreds of underground periodicals, books, and movies. The site is a project that I began to think about when I was working on Sparks, my book on counter-history in China. One key point is that the digital
Xi’s age of Stagnation
“Neijuan (the Chinese term for stasis or an inward evolution) now permeates all aspects of life in Xi’s China, leaving the country more isolated and stagnant than during any extended period since Deng launched the reform era in the late 1970s.” After leaving China in 2020, I returned e
SPARKS Tour Dates
We’re building out a tour this September, October, and November to talk about my new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. I’ll start out on the launch date, Sept. 26, at McNally Jackson in New York City, followed the next day with a talk at
Coming sept 2023: Sparks
Coming 26 September 2023: Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future–my first book in six years, a chronicle of Chinese people inside China today who are challenging the Communist Party on its most sensitive topic, its control of history. Summary From the ba
Hell, Politics, and Religion
Some forthcoming talks are helping me think through a new book, which I want to start writing in 2023 once Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out in September 2023 (more on that in a post coming soon). One of the talks is at the Asia Society on March 1 [&
Faithful Disobedience
How I got to know Wang Yi, the jailed pastor of Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church. This article in Christianity Today (简体字 / 正體字）is an introduction I wrote to a collection of his theological writings, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Mov
Challenging the washington Consensus on China
How a Cornell University professor became a leading voice calling for a more constructive policy toward China. A profile for The New Yorker.