Ian Johnson is a senior fellow for Chinese studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a long journalism career in China, where he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2001, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Chinese government’s crackdown on Falun Gong. He is the author of The Souls of China (2017) and Wild Grass (2004), and this fall his latest highly acclaimed book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (2023). In this interview, we spoke about his new book and about how the underground historian movement should impact the world’s view of China.
Ian Johnson.Illustration by Kate Copeland
Q: At the beginning of Sparks, you write that there are similarities between your previous reporting on religious communities in China and this book about underground historians in China. What similarities do you see between those two communities and how did that previous
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