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 leaders of the Hong Kong Democratic Party announced their plans to dissolve the party. This move comes after years of political pressure from Beijing that includes a national security law.
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The head of a rebel group is now the head of Syria. How will he lead a country destroyed by civil war and sectarianism? NPR found clues in a region in northern Syria, where he governed for years.
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President Trump and Elon Musk's efforts to shrink the federal government have cut off all funding to pro-democracy and human rights groups abroad, giving China an opportunity to muscle in. -
The Syrian soccer player Abdel Basset Al-Sarout became the poster child for the Syrian revolution with his iconic protest anthems. In death, he has become its saint. But he didn't do it alone.
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A rebel coalition overthrew a repressive regime in Syria last December. Syrians are cautiously testing out the newly expanded boundaries for free expression. But fresh constraints are emerging.
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Sharaa was already de facto head of Syria's government ever since a coalition of rebel fighters swept through most of Syria and ousted Assad's regime. -
Syria's new de facto government faces a host of challenges. One of its most pressing is also one of its most basic: keeping the lights on. -
Lebanese residents waiting to return to their villages say the Israeli military has destroyed nearly everything. -
After the fall of Syria's despotic Assad regime, life is slowly returning to one Damascus suburb, where the violence and painful memories of the past are being unearthed. -
For the first time in a decade, Debra Tice, the mother of missing American journalist, Austin Tice, returns to Syria to find news of her son.
