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.
She was the recipient of the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for her overall reporting on the Asia Pacific.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018 and won two Human Rights Press awards. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award. She spearheaded coverage that has won two Gracie Awards. 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.