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 is slowly opening its borders and has lifted COVID controls. But a full-blown economic recovery may take some time.
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People in China will make about two billion trips throughout January for the Lunar New Year — the first without travel restrictions since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
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People remember their loved ones and peers who died during China's latest COVID surge. Their deaths contradict China's artificially low COVID death toll.
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China announced for the first time in nearly six decades that deaths outnumbered births last year. A shrinking Chinese population will have dramatic economic and social effects over the long term.
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Residents held vigils to commemorate people who have died in lockdown. Several have been arrested. -
China has officially opened borders to inbound travelers for the first time in nearly three years.
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Popular tourist sites around the world are preparing for a surge in Chinese tourists now that China has loosened its COVID-related border restrictions.
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NPR's Emily Feng speaks with Jessica Chen Weiss, professor of government at Cornell University, and Nadia Schadlow, senior fellow at Hudson Institute, about the Biden administration's China policy.
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For decades, Taiwan residents have accepted Washington's deliberately ambiguous stance towards the island. But Chinese aggression is causing people there to demand stronger security commitments.
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Earthlings seemed to generate more good news in 2022 off the planet than on. From deflecting an asteroid to sending a camera deep into the universe, a look back on the year in space.
