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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Many Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas in January, not December. In Lebanon, Christians say the holiday is extra poignant for them this year.
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Throughout 2024 negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas were on again and off again. There were moments of great optimism and then months of no negotiations at all.
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After signing a sweeping ceasefire with Israel, the Lebanon-based paramilitary organization and political party is falling out of favor with some of its most ardent supporters.
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Syrian refugees living in Lebanon grapple with whether to return home now that Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship has fallen. Many are hesitating.
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The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has freed thousands of people detained in Syria's notorious prisons. Some of them have made it back home. Other families are still looking. -
China remains the biggest source of immigration into the Asian island of Taiwan, despite their mounting tensions.
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NPR's Emily Feng bids goodbye to Asia — and to Taiwan's strict trash collection system, which she unexpectedly grew to love.
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A Hong Kong court has sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists to up to a decade behind bars after it ruled in a landmark legal case that they had broken a national security law implemented by Beijing. -
Taiwan opera is revered across the Asian island. One of its most beloved traits is its gender-bending character archetypes, and its best-known actors are women who portray men.
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Companies in China are fueling a "silver economy" by adapting to serve hundreds of millions of people over the age of 60.
