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 numbers of Americans learning Mandarin Chinese has declined dramatically, but one elementary school in Washington DC is seeing more demand for Chinese language education than ever.
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The U.S. State Department said it would stop publishing global air pollution data as part of attempts to shrink federal spending. The program set a worldwide standard for measuring air quality.
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The Damascus neighborhood of the man who has been leading Syria's new caretaker government celebrates his new role and reflects on the last 14 years of civil war.
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President Trump and Elon Musk's efforts to shrink the federal government have cut off all funding to pro-democracy and human rights groups abroad, giving China an opportunity to muscle in. -
Rebel fighters who are now part of Syria's new de facto government have been destroying large shipments of Captagon, an addictive drug that was mass produced by the ousted Assad regime.
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After the fall of Syria's despotic Assad regime, life is slowly returning to one Damascus suburb, where the violence and painful memories of the past are being unearthed. -
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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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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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.
