Emily Feng
Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent.
Feng joined NPR in February 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.
From 2017 through 2019, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights, technology, and the environment. While in this position, Feng made four trips to Xinjiang under difficult reporting circumstances. During these trips, Feng reported extensively on China's detention and surveillance campaign in the western region of Xinjiang, was the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uighur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and uncovered that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.
Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, trek out to coal towns and steel mills, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art.
Prior to her work with the Financial Times, Feng freelanced in Beijing, covering arts, culture, and business for such outlets as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Economist.
For her coverage of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Feng was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019 and won a Human Rights Press merit award for breaking news coverage that May. Feng also earned two spots on the October 2018 British Journalism Awards shortlists: Best Foreign Coverage for her work covering Xinjiang, and Young Journalist of the Year for overall reporting excellence.
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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Zhang Hai's father died of the coronavirus on Feb. 1 and was cremated. Ashes can now be picked up, but the government requires a chaperone for visits to the crematorium as well as for burials. -
The end of the city's 76-day lockdown is a milestone in China's efforts to contain the outbreak of the coronavirus that sickened more than 80,000 across the country and overwhelmed health systems. -
For weeks Beijing largely ignored the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. But as they have continued, China's government has become increasingly outspoken. -
As restrictions are relaxed in parts of China where the coronavirus struck, residents in Beijing are cautiously returning to the public spaces they love. -
The 83-year-old, weightlifting pulmonologist is widely seen as a source of reliable information — although one recent comment seems to have been politicized by the government. -
The U.S. and China have clashed over the handling of the coronavirus outbreak. China is using its soft power to compete with the U.S. for influence during the pandemic.
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NPR interviewed four residents of Wuhan who contracted the virus, recovered — but then had a retest that turned positive. What does that mean for China's recovery from COVID-19? -
China makes millions of masks. But ramping up production is tricky. "Making masks is not as easy as you imagine," a pharmaceutical executive in China says. -
As the U.S. manages the coronavirus, NPR's Rachel Martin talks to three NPR correspondents in some hard-hit countries: China, South Korea and Italy, to ask what lessons the U.S. should learn.
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It's the Chinese leaders first visit to Wuhan since the coronavirus outbreak began. There are indications China plans to lift some travel restrictions around Wuhan after the area was locked down.
