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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Beijing says it will test all 3.6 million residents in its largest district after finding about four dozen COVID cases. Residents fear a city-wide lockdown is imminent.
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China's economic downturn has left thousands of migrant workers unemployed. They're pivoting to work in COVID control — and have strong concerns about how they are being treated. -
More than half of China's biggest cities are still under some form of lockdown measures. They're costing people economically and emotionally.
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China's "zero COVID" approach requires hundreds of thousands of temporary workers. They are poorly paid and poorly treated. Where are the new COVID control workers coming from?
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Angry, depressed, or flat out bored by successive COVID lockdowns, Chinese writers are adapting Western literature classics to amuse themselves.
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On March 21, China Eastern flight 5735 plunged more than 7,000 feet in a minute — hitting the ground nose first at near supersonic speeds. All 132 people onboard were killed.
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China's lockdown and quarantine policy is testing the limits of the city of 26 million. Parents were separated from kids. And there's not enough staff for the elderly residents of care centers.
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Battling its biggest COVID surge in two years, Shanghai has instituted rigorous lockdowns — again — that are frustrating residents.
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An Australian journalist goes on trial Thursday in Beijing. She's been accused of espionage and is one of several journalists detained as relations with China sour.
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Two large omicron outbreaks in China threaten the country's zero-COVID approach. A city-wide lockdown in Shanghai is raising questions about whether that policy is sustainable for much longer.
