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 →
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 →
China’s central government has been trying to sinicize religion, and that had especially a major effect on Christianity, writes journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. For the New York Review of Books, he reviews Jesus in Asia by R.S. Sugirtharajah, but starts with a thorough overview of Beijing’s efforts to curtail Read More →
China’s big cities are developing a new city life, including new identities, writes journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, at the opening chapter of, Shanghai Sacred: The Religious Landscape of a Global City, by photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley, quoted in a review of the photo exhibition in Liverpool at Creative BoomRead More →
Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao reviews a show at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City on Tibetan Buddhism for the NY Review of Books, a must read even when you do not make it to New York. Ian Johnson adds on Facebook: “Probably no faith is more stereotyped than Tibetan Buddhism, which has morphed in the West to a sort of feel-good faith led by a nice guy with a Nobel Peace Prize.”Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia tells in The Millions how she became interested in prostitution in China, after discovering her grandma was a ‘working girl’. It took years to write her bestselling novel Lotus: A Novel.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, interviewed extensively Jiang Xue, a 45-year old Chinese writer, for the NY Review of books. She worked for Chinese Business View and Southern Weekend, two papers who suffered from heavy censorship. Jiang Xue is a devout Buddhist and tells in this section on her current life.Read More →
Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, addresses the change China went through over the past twenty years, beyond the poor cliches we often look at. How the country became more important military, as a consumer heaving, but also developing cultural values that were believed to be missing.Read More →
Author Ian Johnson got quite some people thinking after his most recent book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao hit the bookshelves. Some of them got stuck with questions and for Oclarim Johnson answers some of them. How does he define religion, and why are the Tibetans and Uighurs not included.Read More →
China’s recent troubles with Islam and unruly provinces like Xinjiang are not new, nor typically for communist rule, writes journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, for the New York Review of books. “It would be tempting to say that all of this is just typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But the long history of Islam’s persecution points to older, deeper problems in the Chinese worldview.”Read More →
The Venerable Xuecheng did become the symbol for supercharged Buddhism in China. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, looks for the New York Times at how China’s #MeToo movement brought down this confusing factor in the rising Buddhism.Read More →