Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalizedUnited States citizen who has been living in Beijing, China, for more than twenty years. He first visited China as a student in 1984 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. In 2004, Johnson published Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China on grassroots efforts to form civil society. It was later released in paperback and has been translated into several languages. In 2010, Johnson published A Mosque in Munich, a book about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. He conducted research on the book while on a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. In 2017, he published The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao about China's search for meaning and values. It included a 100-page profile of Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu and its pastor Wang Yi who was arrested in 2018 for incitement to subvert state power. It also included one of the last in-depth interviews with the popular Chinese spiritual leaderNan Huai-Chin as well as research on Xi Jinping's support for traditional religions, especially Buddhism, when he was head of Zhengding County in the 1980s. The Souls of China was voted one of the best books of the year by The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor. He has also published chapters in three other books: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China,Chinese Characters, and My First Trip to China. He attended the University of Florida, where he studied Asian Studies and Journalism . He obtained his Master's degree in Sinology from the Free University of Berlin]. 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. Johnson left the Wall Street Journal in 2010 to pursue magazine and book writing on cultural and social affairs.
Ian Johnson, "What Holds China Together?", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 14, pp. 14, 16, 18. "The Manchus... had conquered the last ethnic Chinese empire, the Ming ... The Manchus expanded the empire's borders northward to include all of Mongolia, and westward to Tibet and Xinjiang." "China's rulers have no faith that anything but force can keep this sprawling country intact."
