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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Across China, life has largely returned to normal — except in the western region of Xinjiang. Some 22 million people have been under heavy lockdown since July — and they're questioning its severity. -
Educators, journalists, political figures and ordinary citizens have been intimidated and even arrested as China moves to stifle protest and civil society with its new law.
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After quickly building megacities, the country is kicking plans into high gear to revamp tens of thousands of country villages. Residents say they are forced or coerced to leave their farm homes.
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Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon known as a fervent supporter of democracy and human rights, is the most prominent figure arrested thus far under China's new law.
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With at least 158 dead and thousands of homes collapsed after heavy rains, experts say it's time for China to rethink its water management.
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The order comes in reaction to the U.S. closure of China's consulate in Houston earlier this week. China's state broadcaster says the U.S. Consulate was given 72 hours to close.
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The State Department, in a statement early Wednesday morning, said the move is "in order to protect American intellectual property and American's (sic) private information."
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The U.S. is calling China's claims over the South China Sea illegal. Experts fear growing U.S.-China tensions raise the possibility of military conflict.
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China banned Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as administration officials from entering China in response to U.S. actions in response to the country's treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority.
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Despite fierce international criticism and opposition in Hong Kong, Beijing's rubber-stamp legislature passed a law allowing the mainland to impose security measures in the former British colony.
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At least 15 Chinese workers' rights advocates who were rounded up in recent years have been released from detention, some taking on new identities and jobs, on condition that they abandon activism.
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The idea is to reduce the risk of spread of viruses through animal-human contact. Bamboo rat breeders are devastated by the loss of income. And critics say the ban has too many loopholes.
