Emily Feng
Emily Feng is a White House correspondent at NPR. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and beyond.
Feng joined NPR in 2019. Before that, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, based in Beijing.
Feng's reporting has brought her all over East and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, inside a sauna in Ukraine, on a half-finished boat in the South China Sea, and inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Her book, "Let Only Red Flowers Bloom," published by Crown, came out in 2025. Based on a decade of reporting from the Asia Pacific, the book chronicles how ordinary people are redefining Chinese identity and the state's preoccupation with identity. Her second book, "Our Hearts Burned For Home," set for publication in October 2026, unearths the story of Uyghur exiles who fled China's expanding police state — only to become a pivotal force behind the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.
Feng's work from Taiwan was awarded a citation from the Overseas Press Club award in 2025. She's also been awarded Boston University's Hugo Shong Reporting Asia Award, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, given to a rising public media journalist 35 years of age or younger, and the Shorenstein Journalism Award for her overall reporting on the Asia Pacific.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards and won two Human Rights Press awards. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and she spearheaded coverage that has won two Gracie Awards. 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.
She can be reached via encrypted message at emilyzfeng.96 on Signal.
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Iran has cut off its access to the global internet. To find an internet connection, some Iranians are traveling across the border with Turkey — even just to make video calls and then go back home. -
The border town of Van in Turkey is known for being a hub for Iranian travelers - and its cats.
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Iranians coming across the border into Turkey are less hopeful than they were at the beginning of the war.
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As the war in Iran enters its second month, and President Trump signals an end to the war, many Iranians are urging the U.S and Israel to keep striking their country. -
Gao Zhen, a famed contemporary artist, goes on trial this week for "slandering heroes and martyrs" of China's ruling Communist Party. His wife has been forced to become his advocate.
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U.S. marines have arrived in the Middle East. NPR's Emily Feng has been monitoring the latest developments from the border of Iran and Turkey.
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One month into the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran, we turn to our correspondents across the region to assess the conflict's impact.
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Iranians escaping hardship and war are shaking it off to Persian, Arabic and Turkish tunes in this disco in eastern Turkey. -
China believes the U.S. is a declining power with expansionist ambitions. The U.S. thinks the same of China.
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At Iran's border, those fleeing the war speak of an unbearable choice: endure the regime or risk everything to see it fall.
