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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Demand for coal is skyrocketing in China, which is driving new mining, coal stockpiling and widespread power cuts.
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Land and urban property sales have generated vast wealth in China, but rural residents have been left out and efforts to change that have floundered.
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Questions persist over the well-being of Peng who hadn't been seen publicly after accusing a senior Communist Party leader of sexual assault. A video and photos showed her in public over the weekend.
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President Biden held a virtual summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to go over some of the thorniest issues between the two countries. They gave no hint of Trump-era tariffs being dropped.
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China's ruling Communist Party has released what it calls a resolution on history — a banal sounding document that could decide China's political future.
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"If she does not make it past the coming winter, I hope the world will remember her as she once was," Zhang Zhan's brother said. She posted videos of Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. -
The U.S. and China say they'll work together to limit methane emissions. Environmental experts say the agreement has more significance for geopolitics than it does for climate change.
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Citizens in Ruili are complaining about lengthy lockdowns and terrible conditions in quarantine centers. Others in China don't want to hear about it.
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20 nations are responsible for 80% of the world's carbon emissions. Ahead of the COP26 climate summit, we look at what China, India and Brazil — three of the world's biggest emitters — are doing.
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It's cricket fighting season in China, so NPR went ringside to learn about the centuries-old sport. Turns out, the bugs are really high maintenance, big money's involved and big mandibles matter.
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Concerns about a faltering property company and widespread power shortages have resulted in China's slowest economic growth figures in a year.
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Red City Monastery was a thriving Tibetan Buddhist institution that attracted tens of thousands of wealthy pilgrims a year. Now it's under investigation.
