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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China has reported very few deaths in a massive nationwide COVID-19 surge, but crematoriums and funeral homes say they are overwhelmed.
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Taiwan's semiconductor industry has become a global powerhouse, in part, because of its closeness to both China and the U.S. But now Taiwan may have to choose sides.
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Jiang Zemin rose to power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests and leaves a legacy of economic reforms — but also tight political control. -
Protestors explain why they came out and demonstrated in China. Some say they did it to protest against COVID controls, others for more abstract political ideals.
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The protests drew on deep public dissatisfaction with the country's strict COVID-19 controls. A Chinese government official blamed the unrest on "forces with ulterior motives."
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A deadly fire in Urumqi, China, sparked the mass protests that are currently spreading across the country — with residents demanding democratic reform and an end to COVID-19 controls.
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Protests in support of democratic reforms and against Covid controls are growing across China. They began after a fire killed ten people who witnesses say were trapped in a building under lockdown.
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Residents held late-night demonstrations against draconian "zero-COVID" lockdown measures after 10 people were killed in an apartment fire. Protests in China are extremely rare. -
Earlier this month, China relaxed its strict Covid-related rules. But lockdowns are back as infections have risen.
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Cities are once again locking down thousands of neighborhoods and sending people into quarantine, even as local Chinese authorities are tasked with easing COVID restrictions.
