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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China mines and refines some of the most sought after minerals the U.S. deems critical for technologies like semiconductors and electric cars. Yet moving the minerals' production away from China isn't so easy.
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Gold Apollo denied all involvement with the explosive pagers, telling NPR outside its offices in Taiwan that it was a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting which manufactured the devices. -
Electronic pagers belonging to members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah exploded simultaneously on Tuesday afternoon, killing at least nine people and wounding around 2,800. -
The State Department said that 68-year-old David Lin is coming home after being arrested in China on vague contract charges that he and his family deny. He had been jailed there for 18 years. -
Palau made history a decade ago when it closed off 80% of its oceans to any kind of fishing. A proposal to open up some of its marine sanctuary to fishing has divided residents on how best to protect the oceans around the Pacific nation.
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Security and semiconductors are among Taiwan's priorities, as the island considers the presidential candidates' policies and possible impacts on the island, which China repeatedly threatens to invade. -
Do you sometimes wish you could clone yourself to complete all your work? Companies in China are creating digital avatars using generative artificial intelligence to do just that.
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Startups are catering to mourners who want a way to communicate with their lost loved ones — or at least digital likeness of them. -
A lawsuit alleging a U.S. company used forced prison labor in China could have ripple effects across supply chains. -
Large numbers of migrants from China are crossing into the U.S. and finding work on marijuana farms. Some of the businesses are accused of exploiting workers and violating state growing rules.
