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.
-
Recent trends in public sentiment run parallel to deteriorating U.S.-China relations . In China, the pandemic "increased people's satisfaction and support for their government," says a sociologist. -
Ren Zhiqiang made a fortune in real estate and was a member of the country's political elite. But his harsh criticism of the Communist Party and Xi's management of the pandemic led to his downfall. -
As it has long done with the Tibetan and Uighur languages, Beijing is reducing instruction in Mongolian in favor of Mandarin Chinese in ethnic Mongolian areas of the country. -
Across China, life has largely returned to normal — except in the western region of Xinjiang. Some 22 million people have been under heavy lockdown since July — and they're questioning its severity. -
Educators, journalists, political figures and ordinary citizens have been intimidated and even arrested as China moves to stifle protest and civil society with its new law. -
After quickly building megacities, the country is kicking plans into high gear to revamp tens of thousands of country villages. Residents say they are forced or coerced to leave their farm homes. -
Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon known as a fervent supporter of democracy and human rights, is the most prominent figure arrested thus far under China's new law. -
With at least 158 dead and thousands of homes collapsed after heavy rains, experts say it's time for China to rethink its water management. -
The order comes in reaction to the U.S. closure of China's consulate in Houston earlier this week. China's state broadcaster says the U.S. Consulate was given 72 hours to close. -
Despite fierce international criticism and opposition in Hong Kong, Beijing's rubber-stamp legislature passed a law allowing the mainland to impose security measures in the former British colony.
