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 former premier is dead. Its missing defense minister was dismissed. The foreign minister is in Washington. And trouble may be brewing in the South China Sea.
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Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has died of a heart attack. A respected development economist, he was overshadowed as premier by Xi Jinping.
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Li was groomed for leadership, and was seen at one point as a contender for China's top job, only to be pushed aside as Xi Jinping ascended. -
Inside China, the government is cracking down on queer and feminist spaces. The Chinese-speaking diaspora is stepping up to create those spaces outside China.
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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. -
A month ago, a record number of Chinese fighter planes — 103 of them — flew around Taiwan in just one day. The strategy is meant to wear Taiwan down without ever invading.
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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. -
Australian journalist Cheng Lei has been allowed to leave the country and is back home in Australia after being detained for more than three years on charges of espionage. -
China has secretly given a life prison sentence to a prominent Uyghur scholar of Uyghur culture and religion.
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China's post-pandemic recovery fell far short of the mark. Consumers are spending less. Their lack of confidence in the future is feeding a cycle of stagnation.
