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.
-
Simmering tensions over the South China Sea are front and center during an annual security conference in Singapore this weekend, where there's dueling rhetoric from China and the Philippines.
-
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Chinese counterpart met for the first time in Singapore on Friday, as Washington and Beijing seek to head off potential conflict in the region. -
A decades-long debate at the heart of Taiwan's identity and history is roiling once again: whether to remove hundreds of statues of former authoritarian leader Chiang Kai-shek.
-
Taiwan aims to build its own ChatGPT-like model. Researchers say it is essential for national security -- highlighting how geopolitical competition over data and computing power is heating up.
-
This year, Taiwan's young men face a new, extended one year military conscription. Those concerned about the island's security against China say the conscription isn't enough.
-
Lai Ching-te has been sworn into office with a promise to uphold democracy. Trained as a doctor, the unlikely politician has won a loyal following in southern Taiwan but remains despised in China.
-
The people behind the online scams you see might be the victim of a scam themselves. Tens of thousands of people have been trafficked into remote, Southeast Asian compounds and forced to scam others.
-
China's feared state security ministry has been more public and more powerful in its quest to suppress internal dissent and monitor foreign activity.
-
Fentanyl made from Chinese chemicals is killing tens of thousands of Americans. A House committee report found new evidence the Chinese government supports tax breaks to subsidize the drug trade.
-
About 250 Filipinos live on Thitu Island, the largest and most inhabited island of the Spratlys, in the South China Sea. But Chinese ships are never far away.
