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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First it was the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily and then other independent Hong Kong media outlets closed. A group of anonymous volunteers is archiving the outlets so they don't disappear completely.
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The country with some of the world's strictest COVID-19 policies is gearing up to host the Winter Olympics amid a rise in global omicron infections. Here's how Beijing is preparing.
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The southern specialty — snail broth, pickled bamboo, slippery rice noodles — has taken off. "A lot of people were looking for crazy, ridiculous things to eat," says food blogger Mei Shanshan. -
In advance of global attention for the upcoming Winter Olympics, China's censors want people online to spread "positive energy" — their term for politically correct, feel-good content.
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A once sprawling steel and iron mill will form the backdrop for some of the events during the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics. And parts of the complex have been converted to snow making facilities.
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Lockdowns are so strict and so prolonged in the Chinese city that residents have taken to social media to complain and joke about a lack of basic supplies. -
China has dominated the medal count at the last five Paralympic Games. That's in stark contrast with the lack of disability access in Chinese society.
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Selling land and building cities made China rich. It also created a lot of government debt that China now wants to reduce.
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China is liberalizing birth restrictions because it wants families to have more children. But unconventional families still find themselves constrained by social norms.
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Lithuania's embassy in Beijing evacuated all of its diplomats from China. They left because Lithuania feared China would not recognize the diplomats' immunity from prosecution in China.
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President Biden's Summit for Democracy has kicked off. China is not invited — but it's still trying to project its own narratives about democracy. -
For centuries, owners tied lightweight whistles to their pet pigeons in China. The art of making pigeon whistles almost faded away in Beijing, but a small group of artisans is bringing it back.
