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.
-
Each day the International Olympic Committee holds a press conference to answer a variety of press questions. Today, the spokeswoman for the Beijing Games interjected several times to defend China. -
Rules around the country cut out unmarried women and LGBT people of maternity benefits, even as China's leaders try to get citizens to have more babies to reverse the declining birthrate. -
Who gets to play for a country's national team at the Winter Olympics is an especially complicated question in China, where issues of identity, ethnicity, and citizenship are at stake. -
The stuffed animal version of mascot Bing Dwen Dwen has become so sought after that people are camping overnight to buy it in Beijing. -
In a carefully-managed interview with a French magazine, Peng also said she was retiring from tennis and said her private life should not be brought up in politics or sport. -
Despite a campaign from China to increase enthusiasm for winter sports, many in the country are indifferent to the Games and excitement is more muted than in 2008. -
Being hit, locked in a dark room and forced to hold a stress position — two small Uyghur children recount abusive experiences in boarding school in Xinjiang, where they also lost their mother tongues. -
Athletes and other attendees will be in a closed "loop" with strict rules about everything from daily testing for athletes to how spectators should respond — no cheering out loud, please!
-
The southern specialty — snail broth, pickled bamboo, slippery rice noodles — has taken off. "A lot of people were looking for crazy, ridiculous things to eat," says food blogger Mei Shanshan. -
Lockdowns are so strict and so prolonged in the Chinese city that residents have taken to social media to complain and joke about a lack of basic supplies.
