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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Even though the limit is now three children in China, parents still carry the painful experiences they endured when officials aggressively enforced the one-child rule. -
The five editorial executives, including the editor in chief, were arrested Thursday morning amid a raid of the news outlets' offices. -
This year, China pledged to go carbon-neutral by 2060. It has invested heavily in solar, wind and nuclear energy. Still, coal-fired heavy industry made up 37% of its economic activity last year. -
It's not clear how often or how broadly Beijing will use the law. But by complying with U.S. sanctions on China, businesses could face tough sanctions in China as a penalty for doing so. -
Friday marks the 32nd anniversary of the massacre of protesters in Beijing. But this June 4 in Hong Kong will be unusually quiet for the second year in a row. -
Facing a declining birthrate, China will allow married couples to have up to three children. This raises the previous ceiling of two children. -
Even the rescue teams could not go forward during one of the fiercest of many sandstorms this spring. Herders have lost their herds — an estimated 1.6 million livestock — and their lives. -
Sun Dawu has befriended and supported political dissidents. Now he may become one himself. "This is a simple administrative law case, but it has become politicized and distorted," says his lawyer. -
To her family in southern China, Feng Daoyou remains a mystery. They remember her as generous and headstrong but they knew little of her life in the U.S. She was among eight people killed on March 16. -
The government has declared victory over poverty. NPR talks to the people who've been moved from poor rural villages to brand-new apartment buildings to see how they're now faring.
