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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NPR's Emily Feng talks with Nina Wang, a policy associate at the Center on Privacy & Technology and a co-author of a recent study that exposes the widening dragnet of ICE's surveillance of Americans.
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NPR's Emily Feng talks with the German-Syrian duo Shkoon, who are returning to their roots with the release of their new album FIRAQ.
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A new report from a Washington nonprofit tracks whether goods from China's western region of Xinjiang are made with forced labor, and how they make their way to customers in the U.S. and beyond.
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Law professor Kim Mutcherson said that while states are bound by HIPAA laws, individuals are not. This means that abortion "bounty hunters" could help punish people who seek abortions in other states. -
Finland and Sweden have long kept a neutral position between the West and Russia. But that changed after Moscow invaded Ukraine. Today, the leaders of the two Nordic nations were at the White House.
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NPR's Emily Feng talks with Oliver Milman, environment correspondent for The Guardian, about how U.S. fossil fuel projects are damaging efforts to limit climate change.
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NPR's Emily Feng talks with reproductive rights lawyer Kim Mutcherson about how restrictive abortion laws would be enforced if Roe v. Wade is overturned or weakened.
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NPR's Emily Feng speaks with Molly Farrell from The Ohio State University on why Ben Franklin included instructions for at-home abortions in his reference book, The American Instructor.
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Beijing says it will test all 3.6 million residents in its largest district after finding about four dozen COVID cases. Residents fear a city-wide lockdown is imminent.
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More than half of China's biggest cities are still under some form of lockdown measures. They're costing people economically and emotionally.
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China's "zero COVID" approach requires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers. They are poorly paid and poorly treated. Where are the new COVID control workers coming from?
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Angry, depressed, or flat out bored by successive COVID lockdowns, Chinese writers are adapting Western literature classics to amuse themselves.
