China’s central government has been cracking down on both Protestantism and the Islam over the past year. The direct future looks grim, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao at Foreign Affairs in an addition to a piece he wrote two years ago. The government can still go back to its pragmatic take on religion, but Johnson is not sure it will.

The Chinese government has raided a few popular underground churches, illustrating how it sees religion as a double-edged sword, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, at NPR.

Islam has been high on the hitlist of the central government, but Christian faiths seem to get a different treatment. journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, dives for the Independent into the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, did spend much time with pastor Wang Yi and his Early Rain Covenant Church during his research of his book. Now the government is cracking down, it means a drastic change of attitude by the authorities, but Johnson does not expect the religious revolution in China is over, he writes on his website.

Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, looks at the arrest of 100 participants of the Early Rain Covenant Church and their pastor, Wang Yi, this weekend. Johnson did spend over a year with the underground church and wrote this fast overview for the New York Times.

Most reviewers of Ian Johnson’s latest book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao focus on religion, while his book also has a profound political dimension. “Interesting that only a religious journal gets the deeper meaning of my book–not only as a challenge to religion and values, but also to China’s political order,” writes Johnson on Facebook.about the review in Voegelinview.

Journalist Ian Johnson documented in this book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao how an estimated 350 million Chinese citizens found solace in religion, despite a ambiguous governments. In TimesOut Shanghai he tells how he feels that movement will develop in the future.

China´s first tier cities seem to be getting out of breath, while second and third-tier cities blossom. Business analyst Shaun Rein has been predicting the shift already for a long time, he tells the South China Morning Post. The rising prosperity of lower-tier cities may boost tourism to cheaper destinations like the Philippines and Thailand, he adds.

An almost forgotten episode under Communist rule was the Third Front, an 200 billion Renminbi effort to move from 1964 much of the economic power to China´s inland. Journalist Ian Johnson with historian Covell Meyskens his work on an upcoming monography and his weblog with 5,000+ pictures for the New York Times.

With 700 million mobile internet users China is a fertile ground for mobile-first startups, says William Bao Bean, managing director of the ChinaAccelerator in the Korean Herald. And “In China, there is always a way,” Bean said.