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.
-
Investigative journalist Isolde Raftery of KUOW explains why, two decades later, she re-investigated her own reporting on a teacher accused of sexual abuse.
-
Hoover Institution fellow Eyck Freymann explains what the Iran war and the blockade of the Straight of Hormuz reveals about modern economic chokepoints, geopolitics and war strategies.
-
Suzanne DiMaggio, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explains the nuances of diplomatic moves at a time of military stalemate.
-
In his new Netflix special, comedian Sheng Wang elevates mundane moments - like picking a toothbrush - into punchlines. NPR's Emily Feng talks to the comedian about where he finds joy.
-
Three NPR journalists talk about the challenge of producing independent, accurate coverage of the war with Iran.
-
NPR's Emily Feng speaks with historian Peter Canellos about the Supreme Court's recent voting rights decision and Justice Samuel Alito's role in it.
-
The ICRC president talks about her recent trip to Iran, and warns about the impact of the Iran war on civilians.
-
Planet Money tells the story of how the U.S. lost to China on rare earths.
-
In the warm sun, gathering handfuls of hard olives promised a taste of home that residents of a village in the Homs countryside had been missing for nearly 14 years of civil war.
-
Iran has cut off its access to the global internet. To find an internet connection, some Iranians are traveling across the border with Turkey — even just to make video calls and then go back home.