Emily Feng
Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent.
Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.
Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018, recognized by the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019 and won a Human Rights Press merit that May. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China earned her another Human Rights Press Award, was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and won a Gracie Award. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.
Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.
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It started in July. The callers live in Gourd Island, and they were hoping to share an important message that they say was being ignored by their local authorities. -
The leaders of China and Russia have joined other foreign leaders in Central Asia. Top concerns include Russia's war in Ukraine. -
Perhat Tursun's novel explores human rights abuses against China's Uyghur minority through one man's search for a home. The author himself has been imprisoned and a co-translator has disappeared. -
While many Chechen fighters have deployed in Ukraine for Russia, this group is there to defend the country from the Russians. -
The United Nations human rights chief has released a long-delayed report, concluding that "serious" human rights violations have been committed against Uyghurs and other minorities in the region. -
China has fired several waves of missiles, hitting targets in the waters that encircle the island of Taiwan, after a visit from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi triggered a tense military standoff. -
Both the U.S. and China stepped up military activity in the region ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit. Here's what is different now from crises in the Taiwan Strait decades ago. -
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is making an unannounced, but widely anticipated, stop in Taiwan. The move is expected to increase already heightened tensions between the U.S. and China. -
Ukraine lost territory to Russia in the southern Kherson region early in the war. Residents fleeing rural villages there describe their desperation under Russian military control. -
Ukraine's southern forces have been striking the island in recent days to take out Russian outposts. Russia's defense ministry said its troops left as a "goodwill gesture."
