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 coronavirus is "very unlikely" to have started in a Chinese lab but its path from animals to humans needs further investigation, a World Health Organization team said after visiting Wuhan.
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Feb. 7 marks the one-year anniversary of Dr. Li Wenliang's death from the virus he'd warned about. His legacy lives on through his Weibo page, which has become a kind of confessional.
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Hebei province, with a population of 11 million people, has reported more than 600 new coronavirus cases, since early January.
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Beijing says it has vaccinated more than 73,000 people in the two days since China's first domestic coronavirus vaccine was approved for commercial use.
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With the coronavirus pandemic still raging globally, China will be the only major economy in the world to post positive growth this year. -
Qingdao city officials say no new infections were identified. The extraordinary testing effort followed the appearance of a small cluster of COVID-19 cases centered in a city hospital.
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Across China, life has largely returned to normal — except in the western region of Xinjiang. Some 22 million people have been under heavy lockdown since July — and they're questioning its severity.
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The idea is to reduce the risk of spread of viruses through animal-human contact. Bamboo rat breeders are devastated by the loss of income. And critics say the ban has too many loopholes.
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Meet some of the people in China who lived through the start of the coronavirus pandemic. They have not forgotten the weeks of isolation, fear and heartbreak.
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Officials have discovered 79 symptomatic cases of the coronavirus linked to the Xinfadi food market, prompting a return to partial lockdown measures and fears of a second wave of infections.
