Ian Johnson

GRANTEE

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writing for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He has lived over half the past 35 years in China since studying there in 1984, and speaks fluent Chinese, as well as German and French.

He has published or contributed to six books, including Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change About Modern China, which looked at grassroots protests, and The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, which describes Chinese people's search for faith in a period of economic and political change.

Johnson has won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of China, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club, Sigma Delta Chi, and Stanford University's Shorenstein lifetime achievement award "not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia."

Johnson lived in Beijing 1984-1985, and in Taipei 1986-1988. He later worked as a correspondent in China from 1994 to 2001, first with Baltimore's The Sun and then The Wall Street Journal, where he covered macro-economics, China's WTO accession, and social issues.

He studied and reported from Berlin between 1988 and 1992, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification for Baltimore's The Sun and other newspapers. He moved back to Berlin in 2001, where he served as The Wall Street Journal's Germany bureau chief for five years, heading coverage of European macro-economics, introduction of the euro, Germany's economic restructuring, and social issues such as Islamist terrorism. He returned to China in 2009.

Ian Johnson