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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Turkey isn't a Thanksgiving dish on Taiwan: it's a common topping over rice. Turkey became big in Taiwan, which has a lot to do with the U.S.
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Flash floods and years of unusual rainfall — likely linked to climate change — are degrading ancient cave art along China's historic silk road at a rapid pace.
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More than 100 accusations of sexual harassment and assault have rocked Taiwan's media, music and political circles — showing the gap between laws meant to protect victims and their implementation.
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Tania Branigan, once China correspondent for the Guardian, makes the strongest English-language effort yet to reconstruct what it was like to live through, and then with, this part of Chinese history. -
A New Year's Day tradition returns without pandemic restrictions. Mechanical engineering student Benny Cruz describes the design and construction of the float he'll be driving.
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NPR's Emily Feng talks with Abao, one of Taiwan's biggest pop stars. She is Paiwan, an indigenous people that lived on the island before Han Chinese colonized it more than 300 years ago.
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China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower and Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s offer a look at the future of China's Communist Party.
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Perhat Tursun's novel explores human rights abuses against China's Uyghur minority through one man's search for a home. The author himself has been imprisoned and a co-translator has disappeared.
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Veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin spent years covering China. In a new book, they untangle how China built its formidable digital surveillance apparatus.
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Lorraine Hansberry's play is about a Black family's struggle against racism in 1950s Chicago. At the Beijing People's Art Theatre, director Ying Da is working to bring that story to Chinese audiences.
