Johnson won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in the Wall Street Journal of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

[8] Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Johnson is a naturalized United States citizen who lived in Beijing for over twenty years.

[15] In 2004, Johnson published Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Pantheon) on grassroots efforts to form civil society.

He said the group has schools "to train imams," has funded a "mechanism in the guise of a UK-registered charity," and has a fatwa council to enforce ideological conformity.

It included a 100-page profile of Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu and its pastor Wang Yi who was arrested in 2018 for incitement to subvert state power.

[21] It also included one of the last in-depth interviews with the popular Chinese spiritual leader Nan Huai-Chin as well as research on Xi Jinping's support for traditional religions, especially Buddhism, when he was head of Zhengding County in the 1980s.