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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China's leadership has formally dismissed the country's defense minister, Li Shangfu, two months after he disappeared from the public eye — the second minister to be removed recently. -
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. -
As military tensions with China rise, Taiwan's companies are pivoting from civilian manufacturing to defense and weapons. -
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 children were converted by their father after the parents divorced. The case has thrown into sharp relief the ethnic and religious identity markers that form the bedrock of Malaysian policy. -
The disappointing numbers come amid dropping property sales, weak exports and a stagnant retail environment in the world's second-biggest economy. -
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. -
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. -
China's new defense minister made his first international appearance on Sunday at an annual defense summit, where he delivered a speech full of thinly veiled digs at the U.S.
