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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The concepts in the MingKwai typewriter underlie how Chinese, Japanese and Korean are typed today. The typewriter, patented in 1946, was found last year in an upstate New York basement. -
Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the world. -
Five years ago Beijing imposed a strict national security law in Hong Kong, which effectively outlawed public dissent.
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The race to create more powerful artificial intelligence applications has also created a huge demand in China for high quality training data.
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China is closely watching whether Israel and Iran can broker a ceasefire. Beijing gets much of its crude oil imports from Iran through a "dark fleet" of vessels to evade American sanctions. -
Global instability has rejuvenated both classified and unclassified demand for table top war games. The people who play them take the games very seriously.
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After talks in London this week, the two countries say they're largely going back to a framework they already agreed on in May. -
For the first time, a Chinese fighter plane made a debut in an active conflict. Pakistani pilots manned the Chinese J-10c during four days of clashes against India in May.
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Chinese exports of rare earth minerals, which are vital to carmakers and other industries, and China's access to high-end technology from the U.S., including computer chips, are high on the agenda. -
The Trump administration said it would begin to "aggressively" revoke visas from Chinese students with connections to China's ruling Communist Party or who were studying in fields deemed critical.
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It's the first known call between the two leaders since Inauguration Day — and the first time they've spoken since tariffs began ratcheting up. -
The U.S. says it will revoke visas for Chinese students who study in "critical fields" or have links to China's Communist Party. The move could harm U.S. innovation and science research capacity.
