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 U.S. has offered Hong Kong residents safe haven for up to 18 months. But now that time is up — leaving thousands in immigration limbo.
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People in China will make about two billion trips throughout January for the Lunar New Year — the first without travel restrictions since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
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Residents held vigils to commemorate people who have died in lockdown. Several have been arrested. -
Abao sings in the Paiwan language — not Chinese, which dominates Taiwan's pop music industry. Her popularity reflects the island's overdue recognition and awareness of Indigenous culture.
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China is dropping COVID quarantine requirements for foreigners and says it will start reissuing some visas — after nearly three years of complete border closures.
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Health officials are concerned that people traveling home to their villages for the Lunar New Year could turn celebrations into superspreader events, catching ill-prepared rural systems off guard.
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For nearly three years, China used extremely strict testing and lockdown policies to keep COVID out. Then it abruptly lifted nearly all those controls as a COVID surge spread across the country.
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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.
