Berlin-based journalist and researcher Ian Johnson, author of  The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Ma0,  joins an Asia Society panel on moral authority and how the Chinese government has dealt with faiths over the past decade. While Christianity and Islam are curtailed, traditional faiths are embraced, he says. Other participants include professor Xi Lian, and Whitman College Assistant Professor Yuan Xiaobo. Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis Fellow G.A. Donovan moderates the conversation.Read More →

Islam and Christianity often get a hard time from China’s authorities, while local beliefs, Taoism, and Buddhism enjoy the support of the government. Journalist and researcher Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, followed local pilgrimages for almost a decade and recently joined the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin to study the relation between those beliefs and the state, he tells in an introduction at the start of his new study.Read More →

China veteran Ian Johnson, author of China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (September 2023), announces he will leave as senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and move from New York to Berlin. He will work as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and work from Berlin starting on July 1, 2024, writing a new book on the misuses of religion in Xi’s China in the summer of 2024.Read More →

Foreign media too often focus on China’s crackdown on religion, but former foreign correspondent Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, sees an opposite trend as China’s government started to support traditional faiths, in an effort to gain new legitimacy, he writes in the Council on Foreign Relations. Read More →

Scholar Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, looks back at how China’s government has embarked into new policies on religion at the conference of the 28th International Conference of the US-China Catholic Association, “China, Christianity, and the Dialogue of Civilizations”Read More →

This month the provisory agreement for cooperating on the nomination of bishops between the Vatican and the Chinese government is up for renewable. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, explains why the deal was for the Roman-Catholic church an “understandable gamble,” according to the NCR.Read More →

COVID-19 or the Coronavirus has triggered off a lot of soul-searching in China, says social commentator Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. “All these problems at home and abroad are proof that nature has been interfered with, as humans go against the natural order. This is a good time to revisit the philosophical aspects of Taoism, writes Zhang Lijia.Read More →

The national fight against the coronavirus has also triggered off help in temples, churches and mosques, writes author Ian Johnson of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao in the New York Times, but not all help has been appreciated. Religious groups have been donating large amounts of money, a feature hard to imagine even ten years ago, he writes.Read More →

Foreign media mostly focus on China’s crackdown on religion, but it’s approach has become much more nuanced, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, at the New York Times. Two truly global religions, Islam and Christianity, cause China’s leadership most trouble.Read More →