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 U.S. once controlled the market on rare earth elements, sought after for a range of technologies. But in the last few decades, China has cornered that market and surpassed the U.S. -
China has been able to entirely cut off Europe and the U.S. from several critical rare earth metals. How did it develop such a stranglehold on an industry the U.S. once controlled?
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The world's highest concentration of data centers is in Virginia. Many residents are not happy about that. -
The world's highest concentration of data centers is in Virginia. Residents are not happy about that.
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Changing weather patterns and higher temperatures are affecting some of the most prized tea-growing regions in China and Taiwan.
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The concepts in the MingKwai typewriter underlie how Chinese, Japanese and Korean are typed today. The typewriter, patented in 1946, was found last year in an upstate New York basement. -
Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the world. -
The race to create more powerful artificial intelligence applications has also created a huge demand in China for high quality training data.
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China is closely watching whether Israel and Iran can broker a ceasefire. Beijing gets much of its crude oil imports from Iran through a "dark fleet" of vessels to evade American sanctions. -
Global instability has rejuvenated both classified and unclassified demand for table top war games. The people who play them take the games very seriously.
