Matthew Johnson

Dr. Matthew Johnson is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation. He specializes in China’s contemporary elite politics, strategic thinking, technology policy, and political control over the financial sector and private economy. He is the author of China’s Grand Strategy for Global Data Dominance (Hoover Institution Press, 2023).

Dr. Johnson is founder and principal of AltaSilva LLC, a research-driven consultancy focused on the nexus between China’s party-state and emerging technology sectors. He was previously research director and partner at Garnaut Global, a leading strategic advisory and risk management firm. From 2021 to 2023 he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Dr. Johnson has also held academic positions at the University of Oxford and Grinnell College, where he taught on Chinese history and political thought. His academic publications address a range of correlated themes linking propaganda, CCP ideology and organization, cultural security, state-society relations, and Cold War foreign policy.

He has been a U.S. Fulbright fellow (China), Fulbright specialist, and board member of the Malaysian-American Commission on Educational Exchange. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego and A.B. from Harvard College.