Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Canadian-born American journalist known for his long-time reporting and a series of books on China and Germany. His Chinese name is Zhang Yan (張彦). Johnson writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Johnson won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in the Wall Street Journal of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. 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. In 2019 he won the American Academy of Religion’s “best in-depth newswriting” award.
In 2020, Johnson’s journalist visa was canceled amid U.S.-China tensions over trade and the COVID-19 epidemic, and he left China. He currently lives in New York, where he is Stephen A. Schwarzman senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Books in order of publication:
Wild grass : three stories of change in modern China. New York: Pantheon Books (2004)
A mosque in Munich : Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)
The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao. New York: Pantheon Books (2017)
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. New York: Oxford University Press (2023)
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