The Souls of China: The Complexity of Chinese Religion and a Western Journalist’s Quest in China

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist specializing in writing about China’s long-term social issues, such as the country’s search for faith and values, as well as its political and religious challenges. In this episode, Mr. Johnson explains the complexity of Chinese religion and how it is often misunderstood by Westerners, the nuanced relationship between religion and the Chinese government, the ills of the current state of journalism and its implication on the coverage of China, his take on the refugee crisis in Europe, as well as his prescription for creating a more-unified society with meaningful values in the future . Mr. Johnson is a regular contributor of articles and commentary to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and speaks in the media or to public audiences about China. He also teaches undergraduate courses on Chinese society and is pursuing a doctorate in Sinology at Leipzig University. His two books The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao and Islam in Europe are major focal topics in this episode. Johnson has also spent a significant amount of time working in Germany. He attended graduate school in West Berlin from 1988 to 1992 and worked as a free-lance writer at the same time, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification for Baltimore's The Sun, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Toronto Star. He worked as The Wall Street Journal’s Germany bureau chief and senior writer from 2001 to 2009, leading coverage on European macro-economics and societal issues. He is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China, Stanford University's Shorenstein prize for his body of work on Asia, a grant from the Open Society Foundation, and a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. In the past year, he was also the recipient of the American Academy of Religion's "best in-depth news writing on religion" award for writing on religion.