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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Thousands of probationary federal employees fired by the Trump administration must be offered job reinstatement, a judge in San Francisco has ruled, because they were terminated unlawfully. -
The U.S. State Department said it would stop publishing global air pollution data as part of attempts to shrink federal spending. The program set a worldwide standard for measuring air quality.
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Syrian soccer player Abdel Basset al-Sarout became the poster child for the Syrian revolution with his iconic protest anthems. In death, he has become its saint. But he didn't do it alone. -
The U.S. has unfrozen millions in security assistance for Taiwan, with an eye toward China. -
During a brutal 14-year civil war, Syria's ousted regime dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs and munitions on its own civilians. Now Syria faces the challenge of clearing the unexploded munitions.
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Western countries have imposed layers of crippling sanctions on Syria for decades. Syrians say the sanctions are impeding any hope of rebuilding a country shattered by civil war.
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The leaders of the Hong Kong Democratic Party announced their plans to dissolve the party. This move comes after years of political pressure from Beijing that includes a national security law.
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The head of a rebel group is now the head of Syria. How will he lead a country destroyed by civil war and sectarianism? NPR found clues in a region in northern Syria, where he governed for years.
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The Damascus neighborhood of the man who has been leading Syria's new caretaker government celebrates his new role and reflects on the last 14 years of civil war.
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President Trump and Elon Musk's efforts to shrink the federal government have cut off all funding to pro-democracy and human rights groups abroad, giving China an opportunity to muscle in.
