Pulitzer Winner Ian Johnson Worries Most That People Can No Longer Tell Fact From Opinion | Interviews

"A lot of people go online, but they don't know which parts are actually fact and which are opinion."

On the afternoon of March 13, at The Bookworm, the English-language bookstore in Beijing's Sanlitun, the writer and journalist Ian Johnson told QDaily: "None of us can be good reporters these days, because the good outlets are all gone."

Most people would say Johnson is unquestionably a good reporter. He has worked in journalism since the 1980s, more than 30 years, living and working for long stretches in the United States, China, and Germany, and writing for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. In 2001 his reporting on China won him the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in American journalism. Five years later he became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a program that brings leading journalists from around the world to the university for a year of study. Last year he received the Shorenstein Journalism Award for his contribution to reporting on Asia.

Johnson, 56, was born in Montreal and moved with his parents to Florida. But he has lived in China for close to 20 years — longer than in any other country — and his best work is mostly about China. Unlike many foreign correspondents here, he has never been drawn to Chinese politics as such. He writes instead about China's society, religion, and history, and about the relationship between society and the state. His books include Wild Grass and The Souls of China.

Ian Buruma, professor at Bard College in New York and editor of The New York Review of Books, wrote: "Ian Johnson is not only an outstanding journalist but a tireless researcher. He is a first-rate writer." The writer and journalist Peter Hessler commented: "Most books about China are about politics or economics. The Souls of China is the best exploration of the everyday cultural and moral life of ordinary citizens."

Johnson first came to China in 1984, at 22, on exchange from the University of Florida to Peking University. His favorite thing to do then was to ride around on a Flying Pigeon bicycle with friends, hunting down the temples and Taoist shrines scattered across Beijing with the help of Nagel's Encyclopedia-Guide, a travel guide written before the Cultural Revolution by a group of French scholars and embassy staff. It listed the locations of many temples that were later destroyed or sealed off during those years. At the National Day parade that autumn he watched Peking University students unfurl a banner reading "Hello, Xiaoping." The giddiness of the scene reminded him of Woodstock.

When the six-month exchange ended, Johnson went back to the United States. After college he spent a year and a half at the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, then quit to study Chinese for two years at National Taiwan Normal University. In Taiwan he got to watch the economy take off in the 1980s, and he met his future wife, then his neighbor, who had come from the Free University of Berlin to do research. The two took a trip to Berlin during his time in Taiwan and fell in love with the city. So in 1988 Johnson left Taiwan for Berlin, learned German, and enrolled at the Free University of Berlin to study China's economic reforms. He kept writing for the press throughout. "The Berlin Wall had come down, so there was far too much to write about," he says.

His interest in China took him back. After two years as a reporter in New York he finally got a posting to Beijing, first as the Baltimore Sun's bureau chief, then as The Wall Street Journal's China bureau chief. He stayed nine years. In that time he filed a great deal of news copy and also finished his first book, Wild Grass, three stories about ordinary people fighting for their rights in China at the end of the 20th century. Civil society, Johnson believes, is a crucial force in China's modern transformation.

"The push for change comes mostly from people we rarely hear about: the small-town lawyer who decides to sue the government, the lawyers who step forward for people whose homes have been demolished by force, the woman who tries to expose police brutality. Some are fighting for their families or their villages; some are moved by idealism," he wrote in Wild Grass.

The manuscript was finished in 2001, but that was the year of the September 11 attacks, and American publishers pushed back every book that was not about terrorism or Islam. Wild Grass did not appear until 2004. September 11 also sent Johnson in a new direction: three of the attackers had turned to extremism in Germany, and he grew curious about German mosques. That year he moved to Germany as The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief there.

In Germany he began digging into the Munich mosque, work that became the book A Mosque in Munich. Johnson found that the mosque was the European headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that it was the Brotherhood that turned a place of worship into a grassroots political organization serving party ends. Historically, he argues, governments have used Islam as a political instrument since the Second World War. No religious faith is wrong; extremism is. That is also where terrorism and ISIS come from.

"I found three groups that backed the mosque for ends of their own. The first were Nazi thinkers who planned to use Islam as a political weapon during the Second World War, a strategy that carried over into the Cold War. The second were mostly people from the American CIA, who built on the Nazis' work and hoped to use Islam against communism. Only the third were Islamist radicals, who saw the mosque as a foothold in the West. The three had one thing in common: what they wanted was not a place of worship but a center of political, even violent, activity," Johnson wrote in A Mosque in Munich.

In 2009 Johnson came back to China to keep watching, studying, and writing about Chinese society. In 2017 he published The Souls of China, an account of the revival of Han Chinese religion since the Cultural Revolution. He reckons that 400 to 500 million people in China now hold some religious belief. Every society should have its faiths, he says; Chinese society is returning to normal. "I think a lot of Chinese people are looking for a new set of values. They feel something is missing — you often hear people say society has no bottom line. Some of them think religion can help with that, that it brings values," he told QDaily.

Johnson is now a Beijing correspondent for The New York Times. He also teaches American students at The Beijing Center at the University of International Business and Economics, and is a consulting editor at the academic journal The Journal of Asian Studies.

Watching the world lurch, he feels the decline of newspapers and the shift in the public keenly. "The problem in a lot of countries, I think, is that people can't tell fact from opinion. Many newspapers have folded, so many people don't know the basic things anymore. It becomes hard to vote. Real democracy isn't only about whether people vote for Trump or Hillary; it's also democracy at the grassroots. Through the media, people get enough information to make a rational decision," he said.

This is part of QDaily's interview with Ian Johnson. More of it will appear in later pieces in the series.

Q=QDaily

Z=Ian Johnson

Religion is a political question, but not a tool of politics

Q: Your new book The Souls of China is about the revival of Han Chinese religion. What do you think this revival means? What will it do to Chinese society in the future?

Z: I think a lot of Chinese people are looking for a new set of values. They feel something is missing — you often hear people say, "society has no bottom line." Some of them think religion can help with that, that it brings values.

I don't think this is only a Chinese problem, either. Other countries have it too. Over the past hundred years, as modernization arrived, most societies in the world turned into societies organized around the economy. Whether you are running a museum, a school, or a company, the first question is how to make money, as though money were the most important thing.

A lot of people feel a society like that is missing something. So they go looking for values, in China and everywhere else — in traditional religions, and in new beliefs they think might be of use to them.

Q: So you think the religious revival has helped build new values?

Z: Yes.

Q: But you think it has nothing to do with political reform. Why?

Z: Not necessarily anything to do with political reform. But I've also noticed that the Chinese government is paying attention to new values. Things it once called superstition are now treated with relative openness. It has started a lot of "intangible cultural heritage" projects lately — not all of them religious, but many are.

Take Mazu. You could say she used to belong to Taoism, but Mazu temples don't belong to the Taoist Association; they are cultural centers. Every year there are events, and the Ministry of Culture backs all of them. Plenty of people go to burn incense, and feel it gives them some comfort. Or Miaofeng Mountain in Beijing: its temple fair is a national-level intangible heritage item, and the many incense societies there, associations run by worshippers, get support at the district or municipal level. The temple's deity is Bixia Yuanjun, but the temple isn't under the Taoist Association and isn't registered as a site of religious activity — it belongs to a listed company. In the 1990s Mentougou, the district government, put all of its tourism assets into a tourism development company, Beijing Culture, and listed it in Shenzhen. Jietai Temple, Tanzhe Temple, Miaofeng Mountain — a lot of them are inside it. But for two weeks every year, from the first to the fifteenth day of the fourth lunar month, crowds go there to burn incense, and feel it gives their lives meaning and holds up their faith.

Q: Your last book was A Mosque in Munich, which ends on present-day questions. It seems that in your view the roots of today's problems — terrorism, ISIS — are the same as the ones in that book: governments using religion as a political tool. No faith is wrong; extremism is. Is that a fair reading? Could you expand on it?

Z: That is the danger. If you turn religion into a tool of politics, it is easily politicized. My own view is that religion is better off not becoming a political tool. But in some countries a great many religions have in fact been politicized. You can see it in Western history with Catholicism and Protestantism, and in recent decades with Islam, in some Middle Eastern countries.

The book is about the Muslim Brotherhood. They have one basic problem: they cut the world in two and see it in extremes. Half the world is made up of good, pure Muslims, and the other half of bad, impure ones. Look at the terrorists — the people they kill most are Muslims. If you don't believe in Islam, or if you are a bad Muslim, you don't count as a person, so I can kill you. Other people aren't people, they're black; only our side is good, is white. I think that's the biggest misunderstanding there is.

Q: So you also think the people they kill most are the so-called impure Muslims?

Z: Yes — impure, not good enough. ISIS is one form of that extremism, not so different from the Muslim Brotherhood. Some people in the Brotherhood aren't terrorists; they're intellectuals. I've come across some who are very learned, but this misunderstanding is still there at the bottom of their thinking. So even if they don't behave like terrorists, their thinking leads to the thinking and the acts of terrorists. Because once you say certain people aren't people, the next step is: I can kill you, and it doesn't matter.

Q: A general question: if a government uses religion as a political tool, what does that do to a society?

Z: Every society has many different religions, including Islamic countries — Iran has Christians, Jews, and so on. So if you only recognize and support some religions, what happens to the rest? Take the UK, which has a state church, the Church of England. It gets a lot of government support, and that creates a serious problem for the other religions.

You can encourage a diversity of religions in a society. Other religions aren't necessarily enemies; sometimes they live together peacefully. If you only support one set of people, the others may turn into enemies.

The Chinese government now gives relative support to Taoism, Buddhism, and some folk beliefs, the intangible-heritage things like Miaofeng Mountain, while treating Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism as a problem, because they carry foreign histories and contexts. For now it seems fine, but over the long run there may be trouble.

Q: Brent Fulton, who studies Christianity in China, says the main problem for China's underground churches isn't political — that large-scale urbanization has had an enormous effect on churches that are still developing. What do you think?

Z: Urbanization really is interesting. Thirty years ago, when I first came to China, 80% of people lived in the countryside; now it's about half and half. So a great many people have left the villages for the big cities, and most of them have lost the basic infrastructure of religion. China's traditional temples and religious activities were concentrated in the countryside. Now the people have moved to the cities, so where are they supposed to go? How do they settle the question of faith? Some religions are flexible and handle this more easily. Protestantism basically doesn't need a building — I can do it in my living room, a few people meeting on Sunday. But if I'm a Taoist or a Buddhist I need a temple, and without one, what do I do?

This isn't a dig at the current government. Over the past hundred years, before 1949 as well, a lot of temples were destroyed. There is very detailed research on it: in the late Qing there were roughly 900, nearly 1,000 temples in Beijing, that is, inside what is now the Third Ring Road. How many are inside the Third Ring now? I don't know. Ten or twenty at most. So the places themselves are missing. You want to worship, and there's nowhere to go. There may be more in the suburbs, but getting out there is a hassle. The concrete problem is that people have arrived in the cities and the cities have no temples.

Strongmen, and the craving for strongmen, share one mistake: thinking the problems are simple

Q: A big question. In the last few years a lot of people feel the world is closing in on itself. Globalization and universal values are both in trouble. How does it look to you? Why do you think it turned out this way?

Z: Maybe a lot of people feel the problems are very complicated, so they feel the country needs a strong man as its leader to solve them. That's probably one reason Americans elected Trump and Russians like Putin so much. Exactly why is hard to say.

Q: Looking at history, do you think a strongman can actually solve problems?

Z: No. Because the problems aren't that simple. Trump says he wants protectionism — raise tariffs, restrict steel imports. That will protect the American steel industry, the people who have always worked in steel will get rich, they'll get their old standing back. It's much too simple. Because if you do that, if you restrict steel coming into America from Europe or Canada, they'll restrict your exports in the same way.

So this kind of strongman always thinks solving problems is simple, and that it takes a strongman to do it. They're all weaklings, I'll handle it, what you need is a tough guy. In fact the problems are complicated. Nothing is as simple as he thinks, and he can't solve any of it on his own. Reality involves a lot of parties, governmental and non-governmental. The environment, for instance, may be the biggest problem in the world, and solving it also takes many people working together.

Q: What do you make of nationalism in China today? Many people feel China now looks a lot like Germany rising as a great power at the turn of the 20th century — nationalism running high — and that going further down that road is dangerous. What's your sense of it?

Z: I'd rather not compare China with Germany, because in the end Germany started the Second World War. I don't think China will go that way now. But in certain respects there are real similarities with Germany then: both are rising.

Q: Why do you think China won't start a war?

Z: Because the world's institutions are still fairly stable. Back then there was no international body like the United Nations. Plenty of wars do start from misunderstandings — North Korea and the United States, for example. But other countries can now step in to mediate them. So for now I don't think China will start a war. There are still wars in the world, of course, though few, and most of them are started by the United States, invading one country and then another. A war between two great powers is also unlikely, especially when both have nuclear weapons.

Q: What about a trade war?

Z: I think that's fairly likely, though not certain. There are many populists in the West. France is in better shape; the recent Italian election put populists in as well. Germany is steering clear of it. Britain and America both have it. I don't really understand what Trump is doing. His approach is unlikely to work, but at the moment no one is holding him back. People kept saying it was only campaign talk, that he wouldn't do it as president. Or that he wants to but the Republicans won't let him. There were a lot of those predictions, and they were all wrong. With this steel business, I don't know whether he'll actually impose the tariffs.

The decline of the newspaper, and a Trump — and many Chinese — who can't tell fact from opinion

Q: Is there anything about society today that worries you in particular?

Z: The problem in a lot of countries, I think, is that people can't tell fact from opinion. A lot of people go online, but they don't know which parts are actually fact and which are opinion. There used to be fairly reliable sources of news. There are still plenty of good ones, but many people no longer know what counts as good. We're all living in a post-truth age now. Real news they take for fake news. Trump keeps saying The Washington Post and The New York Times are "fake news." I think it may be the same in China. I read articles on WeChat that look professional and sound entirely reasonable, but that's not how it is at all. It's a serious problem, because people and governments both have to make decisions. If you go by nonsense and half-true information, it's hard to decide well.

Q: How do you think the problem could be solved?

Z: It's a big problem. Hard to say — I don't know. Probably it has to start with education. People have run a lot of experiments, and plenty of readers can't tell the difference. My sister teaches at a high school; she once sent me a piece of fake news about Obama. She couldn't tell either.

Q: What makes for good public discussion, in your view? What should we watch out for when we speak? Because one striking thing now is how rarely you see high-quality public discussion — insults and picking sides are the norm.

Z: Back when Weibo was hot it was a space for public discussion, and that's completely gone now. Everyone uses WeChat now, and WeChat is a lot like Facebook: everything you see was posted by your friends, roughly the same opinions, so there's much less that's public about it. Weibo is more like Twitter — you can still see other people's opinions. Though plenty of people on Twitter also follow only the people they want to follow. I don't read the tweets of Trump supporters either. Old newspapers had many problems, but they had good sides too. Long ago I worked at a local paper in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel, and basically everyone read it. It wasn't necessarily a very good paper, but it carried basic information and ran Associated Press copy. The AP isn't a great outlet either, but it does the job: it would report what Congress passed yesterday and what it decided, in fairly objective language.

If you cared about sports, you couldn't turn the pages without glancing at the front-page headlines, and you'd pick up a few things. Now we can care only about what we want to care about and skip the rest entirely. If you want politics, you won't be reading the AP either. Old newspapers had a problem in that they were monopolies — one city, one paper — but they also served a public function. They put what they judged to be the most important news on the front page. You didn't want to read it, but you'd still see some of it. Now you can read nothing but sports.

We used to tour newspaper offices and ask the circulation department where they went to sell the paper. The answer was simple: when people buy a house they subscribe, so every middle-class family subscribed when it bought a house. It's completely different now. My sister lives in Florida, and when I go out for a morning walk there are no papers outside anyone's door. They used to roll the paper up, put it in a plastic bag, and throw it at the subscriber's door at six in the morning. Now only 10% of households subscribe.

Q: How do you see that change?

Z: Basically, for most people, I don't think it's a good thing. Not because I worked at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but because newspapers used to do a job of public education. They were in it for the money, but 80% of them still had a sense of public service. We tried to put the important news on the front page, to cover national affairs and new problems, so readers would learn what they needed to know. Most American schools sit inside a community, and a school has a board; some of its decisions make for very grassroots reporting, but they matter to residents and they're genuinely useful. What is the board going to do? How should the schools teach? The board votes on it too. Liu Yu, an associate professor at Tsinghua University, wrote about this in her book 《民主的细节》 (The Details of Democracy). But now many papers have folded, and many people don't know the basic things anymore. It becomes hard to vote. Real democracy isn't only about whether people vote for Trump or Hillary; it's also democracy at the grassroots. Through the media, people get enough information to make a rational decision — about the school board, for instance.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on how to fix this? Or does it look very hard?

Z: There are various models. Rich people setting up foundations to support the press, for example. A newspaper had many sections and covered everything; most people wanted the sports pages but had to subscribe to the whole thing. Now you can go online and read nothing but sports. Newspapers used to make their money from advertising — car companies, say — and now the car companies don't come to newspapers anymore. They can advertise online.

Chinese medicine has its logic, but it needs to become science — and that is the government's job

Q: What will your next book be?

Z: I want to write about Chinese medicine. I'm very interested in it. There are very few books about it in the West.

Q: Why that subject? What's the thinking behind it?

Z: I haven't started writing yet. I think how you treat illness differs from society to society, and it says a great deal about the society it belongs to.

Q: What's your own attitude toward Chinese medicine?

Z: It can treat many things. It also has its weaknesses and can't treat everything. I think of it as an empirical way of healing. It didn't come by the route of science, with rigorous proof, but it comes out of several hundred years of people's experience. There are arguments about it too, because a great many people wrote a great deal about Chinese medicine over those centuries.

Q: So it doesn't matter that it isn't science, because it has experience behind it?

Z: Right. I don't think it's absolute — some of it can be turned into science. Turning it into science means running trials, and trials are expensive. Say you want to run a trial on a cold-remedy granule. Who makes money once it's done? There's no patent, and a drug company can't profit from it. So this is really something the government should do.

Q: I'm personally curious: how does someone become a good reporter? Is there a standard for it?

Z: None of us can be good reporters these days, because the good outlets are all gone (laughs). But I think the best thing is to find an editor who will help you. You can learn reporting in school, but it's better to have someone bring you along, something like a master and an apprentice. Without anyone to steer you, it's very hard on your own. So find a good editor who will work on your copy and lift you a little at a time, a mentor. It's like carpentry: to become a good carpenter you need a good master. That's how you get trained.

Q: Which editors mattered most to you?

Z: Some at The Wall Street Journal, and also Peter Hessler. He has helped me a lot; he's very gifted, and he gives me notes when he reads my books. For long, complicated pieces I ask him to read them and tell me what he thinks.

(Note: the interview has not been reviewed by Ian Johnson. Intern Wang Sui also contributed to this article.)

Cover image: a still from the TV series Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (1997), from Douban. Banner image: Ian Johnson, from Ian Johnson's personal website