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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The Pentagon's latest report shows China is on track with its efforts to develop a nuclear arsenal — though their total warheads are still a fraction of that of the US. -
Australian journalist Cheng Lei has been allowed to leave the country and is back home in Australia after being detained for more than three years on charges of espionage. -
As military tensions with China rise, Taiwan's companies are pivoting from civilian manufacturing to defense and weapons. -
Chinese Muslims take roundabout trips for their Hajj pilgrimage, trying to circumvent China's tightened surveillance at every turn — and possible arrest on their return, pilgrims and tour leaders say. -
The Malaysian East Coast Rail Link is a successful feat so far compared to some other Chinese investments in the country — even if it has blown past deadlines and budgets. -
China is removing its foreign minister, Qin Gang, and reappointing his predecessor, veteran diplomat Wang Yi, to fill the position. -
The playful term is trending on social media: Urban workers are embracing (even while joking about) easy-to-fix, healthy Western-style lunches — think sandwiches, veggies ... a lonely baked potato. -
Hong Kong accuses them of violating China's national security law, and is offering a bounty for their capture. The eight, including activist Nathan Law, are wanted for "collusion with foreign forces." -
A look at the "white people food" trend that's caught on with millennials in China.(Story aired on Weekend Edition Sunday on June, 25, 2023.) -
In a first visit to China by a member of President Biden's Cabinet, the secretary of state will seek "open lines of communication" with Beijing but no diplomatic breakthrough is expected.
