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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Syrian refugees living in Lebanon grapple with whether to return home now that Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship has fallen. Many are hesitating.
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The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has freed thousands of people detained in Syria's notorious prisons. Some of them have made it back home. Other families are still looking. -
As China's economy plateaus and social inequality widens, perceptions that people's lives can only improve in China are fading.
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China remains the biggest source of immigration into the Asian island of Taiwan, despite their mounting tensions.
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NPR's Emily Feng bids goodbye to Asia — and to Taiwan's strict trash collection system, which she unexpectedly grew to love.
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Longtime state media journalist Dong Yuyu met often with journalists and diplomats. His family believes he is now being persecuted for those exchanges. -
The U.S. appears looks like Taiwan's most important security guarantor against neighboring China — though President-elect Trump has signaled he will be tough on both China and on Taiwan.
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A Hong Kong court has sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists to up to a decade behind bars after it ruled in a landmark legal case that they had broken a national security law implemented by Beijing. -
Amid geopolitical uncertainties, Taiwan has slashed its investment in China to the lowest level in nearly a quarter century as the island strives to "derisk" itself from its powerful neighbor.
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Companies in China are fueling a "silver economy" by adapting to serve hundreds of millions of people over the age of 60.
