Decades of Maoist communism decimated China’s spiritual life. Embodied in a personality cult, monist ideological fervor, organised political violence against non-believers, physical destruction of religious spaces and texts, and an environment of taboo and fear, the doctrine and practice of Maoism saw an unprecedented cleansing of religion in China, whether it is Islam, Christianity, Daoism, Buddhism or everything else in between and beyond.
Yet, decades of crackdown failed to eradicate religion. Rising from the ruins of Cultural Revolution, China’s religious spiritual life saw a rewakening from the 1980s onwards. Mosques, churches, temples and dagobas were rebuilt; families resumed tomb-sweeping of the deceased in traditional ceremonies; a new history was being researched and written. Observing and writing about this spiritual revival was Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specialises in the grassroots society of China. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, covering the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history.
Ian has written several renowned books, including Wildgrass, A Mosque in Munich, The Souls of China, and Sparks. He is also the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films. His work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China, Stanford University’s Shorenstein prize, the Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news writing, and grants from the Open Society Foundation and Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
Today, we trace Ian’s observations of China’s spiritual revival through his book-writing from The Souls of China and Sparks, two books that I enjoyed very much last year, and would definitely recommend to anyone hoping to understand China’s grassroots movements to define and practice its own identity. We also package juicy little book-writing tips in this piece for the benefits of other aspiring writers.
Leo
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“Couldn’t there have been one person that succeeded?”
Last time we spoke about your Pulitzer Prize-winning Falun Gong reporting. How did that and other experiences change your views on China throughout the ’90s?
The crackdown on Falun Gong made me realize that the party was still willing to use strong violence to crush a movement. That informed how I wrote my book about the 1990s, Wild Grass.
In each of the book’s three storylines, the people failed. The book was not meant to be negative. I remember Marcus Brauchli, the China editor at the Wall Street Journal, asking me, “Couldn’t there have been one person that succeeded?” I said, “This is what the reporting led me to.”
It doesn’t read negative really, despite that they all failed.
Wild Grass has three main stories. One is about farmers who sue the government to stop illegal taxation. One is about urban dwellers who sue the government to stop tearing down old Beijing. And the other is about Falun Gong, which is also about trying to petition and redress a wrong. The last line of the book is [Falun Gong practitioner] Ms. Zhang saying, “China is still trustworthy, we’re still waiting”, even though she had all these setbacks.
You could see in some ways that these people did affect policy. In the case of the farmers, the government really did eliminate those illegal taxes that the farmers argued against.
You could say that some of these movements succeeded, even though the cost was terribly high.
As for urban protection, of course, Chinese cities still ended up tearing down most of their old cities. But the urban preservation movement took hold, and the destruction of old Beijing has completely stopped under Xi Jinping. Maybe in that sense, the people succeeded.
In the case of Falun Gong, although it was brutally suppressed, the government ended up changing its policy toward folk religious groups, and supporting them with intangible cultural heritage — not Falun Gong, of course, because that’s totally taboo.
You could say that some of these movements succeeded, even though the cost was terribly high.
After this stint in China, you became the Wall Street Journal’s Berlin bureau chief, and following 9/11 you reported on Islamic extremism in Germany. Why did you move to Germany?
I’d been in China for seven years, and I wanted to get away for a little while. I’d lived in Germany before, and thought of Germany as my long-term home and base.
It was exciting to be there for 9/11 because three of those four pilots were radicalized in Germany. So, we were at the center, and I was in charge of all that terrorism coverage. I had nine people that I was managing. If I had wanted to just make a career in journalism, that was a good job, and I could have continued on.
But I realized after a while that this is not what I wanted to do. When I got to Berlin, we were staying with a friend in her apartment, and I remember sitting on the sofa writing Wild Grass there. And the process of that was really satisfying. I was friends with Peter Hessler, and I was on this crash course of writing nonfiction and reading John McPhee and all these classics, and I thought, gosh, this is really what I want to do. I want to write books. I want to write magazine-style articles. But I had just accepted this big promotion to be the Germany bureau chief. So I did that, but I wanted to get out of it pretty quickly.
When did you eventually return to China?
In ‘07, the Journal applied for me to get a Chinese visa. The foreign ministry rejected it emphatically and said, “This person will never get back to China because of what he wrote about Falun Gong.”
Our editor asked them, “Is it possible for him to come in temporarily and cover something?” They said they would consider a J2 visa. A J1 is a renewable multi-entry visa; this is the one you want. With J2 visas, you come in for a limited time.
So we began this dance, which took effort on our part. The strategy was that, at the right moment, we’d have a high-level figure to speak on my behalf, and then they do it as a favor to that person. But we had to set it up ahead of time.
Imagine that your self-criticism could be printed on the front page of ‘People’s Daily.’ Don’t say anything that you’re going to regret.
I remember I got my first three-day J2 visa for the Summer Davos in China, in Dalian. Then I got a five-day visa, a 10-day visa, and a two-week visa. By then, we’re already into 2008. The Olympics are coming up. China doesn’t want to look like they’re keeping foreign reporters out. They gave me almost a four-week visa to cover the Summer Olympics.
Meanwhile, I wrote a self-criticism. I remember talking about it to [China correspondent expelled after Tiananmen] John Pomfret. He said, “Imagine that your self-criticism could be printed on the front page of People’s Daily. Don’t say anything that you’re going to regret. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I apologize for this or that.’” So I wrote 10 pages on why I got interested in China back in college.
A personal biography.
Yeah. When I got to Falun Gong, I said, “Of course, in hindsight, being more mature now, I would do things a lot differently.” Maybe I was thinking I would stick the dagger in even further. But you could also read that to mean, “I wouldn’t believe those guys.” That was what they needed.
My door-opener was none other than Rupert Murdoch. I can’t remember whom he met. He went into the meeting and just said, “give this guy a chance.” At the end of ‘08, I got the full J1 visa, and I was back as a correspondent.
I knew that I did not want to stay at the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t just because of Murdoch. The paper was changing. It was becoming less investigative, less feature-y, more conventional. Also, I was changing. I wanted to write magazine pieces and then my own book on China.
Writing The Souls of China
You still wrote a lot for the New York Times.
The most fruitful relationship I had all through the 2010s was perhaps with the New York Review of Books. Every year for the past 15 years, I have written about three full-length articles for NYRB.
In 2010, I started A Q&A series with public intellectuals in China. That was important in shaping my thinking. I was talking to some people about China’s spiritual dimension, and the historical dimension came up — history as a kind of religion. So I knew early on in the 2010s that I wanted to write a book on the uses of history in China.
But the religion book [The Souls of China] took shape early. I knew I wanted to write on different faith groups. My first decision was to only write about Han Chinese, because it would be infeasible to write about all the different ethnic groups in China and their faiths. Tibetans and Uyghurs are really different subjects. It’s often about ethnicity, independence, and the struggle against Han domination. It would be too complicated, and I don’t speak their languages.
China is basically a multi-ethnic empire, and if you think of it in terms of colonial studies, you have the colonies and you have the metropole. I thought that if I focused on the Han, I would still be covering 1.4 billion people. It’s already enormous.
What did you want to achieve with The Souls of China when you began?
I wanted to show that there was this spiritual and religious revival in China. I believed that religion was undercovered in China.
When did you have the idea of writing the book?
I came back to China with the goal of writing the book. Even in the ‘90s, I wanted to write a book on religion in China and especially on Daoism. That became the Falun Gong part of Wild Grass. But then I thought, no, I want to do a proper book just on religion in China.
The Souls of China has five different storylines. How did you pick your main protagonists of the book?
I knew I wanted to cover different faith groups. I only wanted one of the stories to be Christian. I ruled out Catholicism because it had been largely stagnant since 1949. The Protestants seemed more interesting and dynamic. I wanted to go to an urban church, because China was urbanizing, so I picked Wang Yi’s church in Chengdu.
Somebody introduced me to him. Of all the people I wrote about in The Souls of China, I had the most qualms about him, because I wanted everybody to be representative. He’s very well-known so he was an outlier, but the overall trend of big urban churches with their own ecosystem was a valid macro trend. He’d already been in trouble with the government. Most pastors don’t challenge the government. So in some ways, I was playing into the stereotype of the brave fighting against the government-type religious figure.
Which you did not want to report on, but then you got pulled into his charisma.
He was a charismatic figure, and a great speaker. There was so much about this church that was interesting, and which was reflected nationally in other churches that I was like, “Okay, we’ll go with him.”
The Daoist musicians, the Li family in Shanxi, were in New York City. This Englishman, Stephen Jones, one of the foremost ethnomusicologists in China, brought them out to participate in this concert at Carnegie Hall. I thought the Li family was the most interesting of the people up on stage, but I didn’t see the spiritual side. They had Daoist stuff on, but they weren’t ordained Daoist priests. I went back and talked to them, and I met Li Bin, the son, and he said, “If you’re ever in China again, come on by.”
‘The Souls of China’ captures a trend in China that is still valid — this search for meaning.
I went to Datong and called up Li Bin. He said, “Come see us. We’ve got a concert this afternoon.” I’m like, “You do? Wow, that’s cool.” I immediately got in the cab. They’re in somebody’s courtyard home, and there’s a casket and a dead body. People are dressed in white. I was like, “What are you guys doing? This is a funeral. I thought you guys were Carnegie Hall musicians.” He says, “That’s this weird thing that Steve has us do every five years. The rest of the time, we’re doing this.” That’s how I got to meet them.
I had gone to Miaofengshan in the 1990s. I was fascinated by the mountain and by its history, and I went back there when I was looking for things to write on. I was just curious, so I went to the temple fair in 2011. I met the old Mr. Ni. Over that summer, I went to their home and got to know the Ni family, and I thought, “This is the real deal, this is perfect.”
The government chapters were about trying to show the rituals of CCP rule. They have these religious rituals, just like in the United States with all those patriotic holidays and so on. And for the internal alchemy chapters, I was introduced to him through Nan Huai-Chin, who I wrote about.
What was the reporting process for Souls of China?
I structured it around one lunar year. I did all the reporting in one year, 2012, because I wanted to show direct parallels in these faith groups.
I first went to the Babaoshan [cemetery] for a government story: a Tiananmen mother who tries to lay wreaths at her husband and son’s tomb every year. She wanted to pay respects during the Qingming (Tomb-sweeping) Festival, but they never let her. They always make her go a week or two ahead of time.
That worked out perfectly for me, because then for Qingming, I could go to Shanxi and spend Qingming with the Li family while they were working at funerals. That allowed me to understand their whole family history.
From there I went directly to Chengdu for Easter. Religions have this perfect synchronicity sometimes. There’s clearly something about death and rebirth in the spring time. I made these neat parallelisms in the book. But it only really worked because it was happening in real time. That gave the book dynamism. It was a crazy year.
The Souls of China is a book that has its flaws, and like any non-fiction book, it begins to date after time because you’re writing about events in the past. But it does capture an overall trend in China that was valid, and is still valid — this search for meaning.
How long did it take for you to write The Souls of China?
About a year. I had a writing schedule where I would wake up every morning, and I would make myself tea, and then, ideally, I wouldn’t even look at my email. I would turn off the router, I would go to a sofa, I would sit there with my laptop, and I would write. I would have to have my 500 to 1,000 words down.
Some people write best while drinking whiskey at midnight, but I’m a morning person. Probably for most people, their minds are fresher in the morning. Don’t waste your time on email. Once you get going — “Oh, I just have to answer that” — before you know it, two hours have gone by. Then your brain is starting to get a little fried. Have a second cup of coffee and now I’m going to write. That’s a slippery slope. It’s better not to do that.
What I would normally do is, I’m working on a chapter. I would get up, read the chapter through to where I am and just start writing, and try to not fixate on sources and quotes. Instead, just put in, “quote by so-and-so saying blah, blah, blah.” Keep writing.
How did you find your book deals and publishers?
I had an agent named Chris Calhoun. He pitched Wild Grass to the editor Dan Frank of Pantheon, which is part of Random House. When I handed in the manuscript for Wild Grass, it was just at the time of 9/11. They said, “Wait on it.” They published Wild Grass in ‘04.
Then I came up with the A Mosque in Munich book. Chris offered it to Dan. Dan said yes, but then the paperback guy said, “No, there’s another book coming out on Islam in Europe from another part of Random House. Both would come out in paperback at the same time. I can’t take this.” So, he killed it.
If I’d had ‘Sparks’ earlier in my career, it would have made it easier to get books published.
I then went with Harcourt, which was an okay experience, but the editor at Harcourt who bought it left. So I was left with another editor who inherited this book and didn’t know whether they did or did not like it. They didn’t buy it, it’s not their baby.
For The Souls of China, Chris went back to Dan, and Dan said, “Oh, this is going to be great.” He did a good job editing it, a beautiful cover. He came up with the title.
The funny thing is — one of the blog pieces that I wrote for the Review was assigned to me by an editor, who said, Timothy Snyder, a well-known American academic on the Holocaust, “he wrote a piece for us called ‘Who Killed More, Stalin or Hitler?’ How does Mao fit into this?”
I wrote a blog piece for them. It’s interesting in a morbid way. I cited Jung Chang who wrote a biography of Mao with her husband, Jon Halliday, and she said Mao was responsible for 100 million deaths. In the piece, I said, “this number is not accepted by any serious academic.” She was Dan Frank’s author. With the Sparks pitch, Dan didn’t even think about it. He rejected it with one line, “No, I’m not interested.” And then he wrote paragraphs saying, “How could you have impugned the reputation of excellent archival research?”
That’s why I ended up going with Oxford University Press. They’ve got a good pitch and they do good books, but it’s hard once you’ve published several books and they haven’t really sold well. It’s a pity that Sparks wasn’t a commercial book, in the sense that it sold well. If I’d had Sparks earlier in my career, it would have made it easier to get books published.
Uncovering China’s hidden past through Sparks
How did you get the idea for writing Sparks?
It goes back to the Q&A series I did for The New York Review of Books. The first person I talked to was Yang Jisheng, and he made me realize the different ways that people tried to solve China’s authoritarian malaise.
Some looked at it as a spiritual quest — China has to have a spiritual revolution before it can have a political revolution. Quite a few people converted to Christianity after June 4th.
But other people I talked to felt that history was the cause of the problem, that the party’s control of history was something that had to be broken up. I began to think this would be a great topic for a book. While I was writing The Souls of China, I was starting to do the reporting for Sparks.
I continued to work on this through the 2010s. The book suffered slightly because I was expelled from China in 2020. If COVID and the Trump administration’s suicidal policies on China hadn’t intervened, I would have probably stayed. I never went to [Mao-era activist writer] Lin Zhao’s grave; that’s the place I really wanted to go.
The filmmaker Ai Xiaoming is one of the main characters of your book. How did you come to know Ai Xiaoming and what was your impression of her?
This was a trip that [photographer and now wife] Chi Yin and I took to Wuhan in 2017, 2018. We interviewed novelist Hu Fayun and Ai Xiaoming. She was already a well-known public intellectual. She was helpful and willing to let us come into her home and talk, and have her portrait taken. She’s almost intimidating, because she’s so smart, knows so much, and has done so many things. You can’t just wing it going into the interview, “So, what are you up to?”
Why did you decide to make her one of the central figures?
Because of her personal biography. It’s important that you have somebody who can go from the beginning to the end of the book. Ai was born in ‘53, so her biography is a biography of the PRC. She was a sent-down youth, took part in the Cultural Revolution, and in the 2000s she was involved in the civil society movement. Ai Xiaoming’s films cover the gamut of topics, especially current issues.
My attitude toward the intellectuals in the ‘90s — “I’m going to write on grassroots stuff because intellectuals aren’t doing anything” — was not only stupid, but arrogant.
When you sit down with the material you have, and begin to think, okay, I want somebody who I can put in this chapter, in this section, in every section. Do I have enough material to do that? I have enough of Ai Xiaoming for sure. She pops up again and again in the book, because she has talked to all these people.
What did you want to achieve with Sparks?
When you’re starting a project like this, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. With Sparks, I wanted to describe the scene. It was opening up new horizons for me in understanding independent intellectuals in China. I didn’t realize how much they had done over the decades.
My attitude toward the intellectuals in the ‘90s — “I’m going to write on grassroots stuff because intellectuals aren’t doing anything” — was not only stupid, but arrogant.
I was also pissed off that people like me had that attitude. The broader public in the West was so familiar with these Central and Eastern European intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Václav Havel, filmmakers like Miloš Forman. People who read The New York Review of Books would know who these people are. But I can’t say the same for the Chinese. I thought, here’s a chance to introduce readers to these people.
Many Americans think that nothing’s happening in China, that independent voices have been completely eradicated — it’s all Xi Jinping all the time. This book shows that you can’t completely write off the country.
Expulsion, the ultimate fate of a China reporter
You touched on being expelled from China. What happened?
The context was that, in 2020, during the election campaign, the Trump administration made four big policy decisions to bash China that were part of Trump’s re-election bid. They closed the consulate in Houston, killed the Fulbright program, the Peace Corps program, and kicked out 58 Chinese journalists.
China responded by closing the Chengdu consulate and by kicking out roughly 15 U.S. journalists from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and one other publication.
I got in during a period of bipartisanship when everybody was working to help get more journalists into China. And I left because of a policy that was essentially aimed at cutting off ties with China. That was a symbolic ending.
It’s a great shame that you’re not in Beijing anymore. Many still remember fondly your debate at the closing of the bookstore.
At the Bookworm?
Yeah, where you dressed up in an emperor’s gown and debated whether the Ming or Qing was better.
And I lost. I took the Ming dynasty and Jeremiah Jenne — a very well-spoken guy and has a PhD in Qing history — argued that Qing was better and he won.
Was that the motivation for you doing a PhD?
Yes, to get back at Jeremiah.
Archiving a different China, one PDF at a time
Sparks is about underground historians, whose work stands in opposition to the Communist Party, which spins history to show that it deserves to rule. What do you think the consequences are of the party distorting history?
One consequence is that the party is caught in this never-ending struggle to have to justify itself by performance. If they have 9% economic growth, then nobody cares about your historical claims. Your justification is clear: The economy is doing great. But if that fails then this matters more. People then say, “Wait a minute, why are they running the country if they’re not doing a good job?”
Was your motivation for founding the China Unofficial Archive, the Zhongguo Minjian Danganguan, to preserve that different diverse understanding of history?
There’s no place to go where you could find all this material. So I thought, “Why not try to set this up?” I ended up underestimating how hard it would be because there’s so much of it. As I began to work on it, I began to even more fervently believe that it was necessary because I thought, “Gosh, I don’t think Westerners understand.”
What are your future plans?
I’ll move to Berlin. I’ll be writing a book, which will be an outgrowth of my PhD thesis on pilgrimage associations in Beijing, which is one of the groups I wrote about in The Souls of China. The more general-interest book from that is how religion and faith are being instrumentalized and used by the CCP in China. These groups are all being co-opted as part of a government program to build legitimacy by embracing traditional values.
I want to keep the Archive going and expand it. I hope to do more fundraising. I’d like to write a regular column based on the material in the Archive. Possibly at some point, I want to go back to China but I’m not entirely sure. I doubt I’ll be able to after Sparks and especially after the Archive.
The Archive got some unwanted attention because of some foolish person who came and visited me earlier this year. I showed her the Archive website and showed the curator’s letter on going to the Association of Asian Studies meeting in Seattle in March. She took a picture and sent it to some well-known public intellectuals via WeChat, which is the stupidest thing possible, and said, “The Archive is going to have a meeting with thousands of people in Seattle.” It’s completely wrong. The Association of Asian Studies has thousands of people going, and we had one little panel with four people from the Archive, which had an audience of 30 people.
Then the Public Security Bureau began calling people up, including somebody’s family in China, and said that if they went to the meeting in Seattle, they’re going to get in trouble, that the Archive was anti-party. They’ve completely overestimated the Archive. I don’t think it has that kind of impact in China. I wish it did.
Looking back, how did your views on China change over the years?
I went to China always as an observer, and I didn’t have a plan or think “I hope this happens to China.” Like a lot of people in the ‘90s, despite Tiananmen, I was optimistic. I thought that the country would become more open. I didn’t think that China would never reform.
I still don’t know that it never will. We’re looking at things now and we think things will never change, but they could change by the time somebody is looking at this five, 10, 20 years from now. They may say, “It turned out that, after Xi Jinping, things changed radically in China.” Who knows?
The very last line of Wild Grass I kept cautious and optimistic. Everybody failed in Wild Grass. But Ms. Zhang said, “China is still trustworthy, we’re still waiting.”
Recommended readings
Ian Johnson, 2004, Wild Grass, Pantheon
Ian Johnson, 2010, A Mosque in Munich, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Ian Johnson, 2017, Souls of China, Knopf Doubleday
Ian Johnson, 2023, Sparks, Oxford University Press
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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