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 island nation of Palau is at the center of tensions involving the U.S., China and Taiwan. It's a delicate geopolitical balancing act that Palau has had to do since its inception.
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Online store owners in China are protesting against what they say are heavy and arbitrary fines imposed by Temu, one of the world's biggest e-commerce platforms.
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Do you sometimes wish you could clone yourself to get all the work you have done? Companies in China are creating digital avatars using generative artificial intelligence to do just that.
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The Chinese coast guard boards vessels in waters China considers its own -- including waters around one Taiwanese island, where residents have long been caught in the middle of tensions with China.
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China is trying to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in its legal system. One man's more than two decades-long fight on death row shows why that's so difficult.
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Generative artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream in China, with companies using it for an unconventional service - to "resurrect" the dead. Many questions are being raised.
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Ukraine's president alleges China is helping Russia to undermine a global peace summit as he turns to Asian nations for help in ending a war.
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A decades-long debate at the heart of Taiwan's identity and history is roiling once again: whether to remove hundreds of statues of former authoritarian leader Chiang Kai-shek.
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Taiwan aims to build its own ChatGPT-like model. Researchers say it is essential for national security -- highlighting how geopolitical competition over data and computing power is heating up.
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Lai Ching-te has been sworn into office with a promise to uphold democracy. Trained as a doctor, the unlikely politician has won a loyal following in southern Taiwan but remains despised in China.