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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Jiang Zemin rose to power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests and leaves a legacy of economic reforms — but also tight political control. -
Protestors explain why they came out and demonstrated in China. Some say they did it to protest against COVID controls, others for more abstract political ideals.
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Residents held late-night demonstrations against draconian "zero-COVID" lockdown measures after 10 people were killed in an apartment fire. Protests in China are extremely rare. -
Cities are once again locking down thousands of neighborhoods and sending people into quarantine, even as local Chinese authorities are tasked with easing COVID restrictions. -
Russia fired a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Tuesday, killing at least one person. Hours later, Poland said there was an explosion on its territory near its border with Ukraine.
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World leaders are discussing high food and energy costs, boosted by Russia's war in Ukraine, at the G20 summit in Bali.
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The three-hour meeting between Xi and President Biden finished Monday with both leaders expressing an openness to restoring communication channels and repairing the U.S.-China relationship. -
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a high-stakes face-to-face meeting in Bali, Indonesia. -
President Biden and China's leader Xi Jinping are expected to meet on Monday. Expectations are low that the two men will be able to prevent the relationship from cratering into a new cold war.
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The U.S. Army is retooling itself in the Indo-Pacific region to build up deterrence against its top challenger: rising China.
