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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U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin attended a high-profile security conference in Singapore amid growing tensions with China.
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China has refused to let its defense minister meet formally with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. However, the two defense chiefs did briefly exchange words and shook hands before Friday's dinner. -
The defense chiefs from the U.S. and China are headlining an international defense summit in Singapore, but it appears they will not directly meet with each other.
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Hundreds of people gathered outside a mosque in southwestern China. They were protesting the planned removal of the mosque's domes, part of a nationwide campaign to eliminate Islamic influences.
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Decades ago, Taiwan set up propaganda broadcast stations on islands right off the coast of mainland China. One of its key tools: women's voices. -
Taiwan legalized gay marriage in 2019, becoming the only place in Asia that allows it. But until now, those married couples could only adopt children related to one of the partners. -
China is pressuring Taiwan residents using misinformation and propaganda. Taiwan once used information warfare to sway Chinese citizens to defect to Taiwan. Among its key tools: The female voice.
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The effort to include women comes as the Asian island revamps its defenses against China. While Taiwan does have a full-time military, it's only 190,000 people compared to its 1.6 million reservists.
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Tania Branigan, once China correspondent for the Guardian, makes the strongest English-language effort yet to reconstruct what it was like to live through, and then with, this part of Chinese history. -
China says it has detained a prolific book publisher Li Yan-he. Friends say he was detained for publishing politically sensitive books — many of which are banned in China.
