Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. He has spent about half of the past thirty years in China, first as a student and then as a correspondent.

He is also an advising editor for The Journal of Asian Studies and teaches on religion in China. He is the author of two other books that also focus on the intersection of politics and religion: Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in China, and A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. He splits his time between Beijing and Berlin.