Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson (born July 27, 1962) is a Canadian-born American journalist and independent writer 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 US-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. Life and work Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalized United States citizen who lived in Beijing, China, for more than twenty years. He attended Chamberlain High School in Tampa, Florida. 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.