Visiting Duke, Emily Feng shares insights from a career reporting in China

Coming back, paying it forward

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On March 20, in the first event of a brief residency, Duke alumna and award-winning journalist Emily Feng met with a select group of students for a special workshop on journalistic writing and podcasting. Engaging thoughtfully and in-depth with each of the attendees about their own projects and aspirations, she candidly addressed some of the major advantages of audio and written publication as well as industry challenges and opportunities stemming from the rising popularity of video-based platforms.

The students were eager to share their own experiences, asking frank questions about working in a field that is rapidly changing due to shifts in technology that have lowered the barrier to initial engagement with audiences while simultaneously making it more difficult to retain listeners’ and viewers’ attention. Feng addressed these concerns with practical insights, drawing on her decade of experience producing written as well as audio journalism.

Emily Feng's podcasting workshop was a good way to hear about her experience working as a radio journalist and to receive some practical advice about the process of making episodes, interviewing, and even editing tape. Additionally, she highlighted the creative potential of podcasting as a bridge—guiding audiences toward deeper engagement with a book, a series, or other forms of storytelling. 

—Yaa Bame, Trinity ’26

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After soliciting details about each student’s academic and journalistic interests, she gave specific examples and suggestions for how they could experiment with developing their own content in ways that supported their academic or personal goals. Throughout the hour-long workshop, Feng provided personalized guidance for each participant. The students left the session with a sense of optimism, emboldened about their ability to begin contributing their own voices to ongoing media conversations and to begin new discussions about topics of interest.

 

We also discussed what makes a podcast successful, and I was surprised by the many creative ways to engage an audience. It really got me thinking about how audio content can complement some of my current work. Overall, the session left me feeling much more confident. It was exciting to realize all the possibilities out there!

—Leo Lyu, MA in East Asian Studies ’26

A candid conversation

That evening, the stage was set with a warm glow, contrasting the chilly rain pattering against the windows of the Ruby Lounge. In the first public talk following the official release of her new book, Emily Feng addressed a near-capacity audience at her alma mater. Over the course of a conversation with Professor Eileen Chow, Feng shared insights from her experience as a China-based reporter for multiple outlets, including The New York Times, the Financial Times, and NPR, where she currently works.

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As Professor Ralph Litzinger noted in his introduction, through her insightful journalism, Feng would “write and talk to us about stories of struggle, injustice, unthinking violence, of women's issues, ethnic minority issues, but also stories about aspiration, of the brilliance of people she was meeting in China, of longing, identity and belonging in a country that has not only changed so remarkably in the last three decades, but even more proudly since Emily showed up in Beijing in 2016. Through her writing and reporting, she has brought the beauty and complexity of so many people’s lives to us every week. And now, she has brought these amazing stories and her storytelling skills, as well as her empathy, compassion, and always-searching philosophical mind to her greatest accomplishment yet, her book: Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China.”

A window to inner worlds

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Chow noted that Feng’s writing in the book is an engaging blend of styles, combining a journalist’s meticulous eye for detail with a novelist’s sense of narrative. While each chapter tells a complete story, several people make multiple appearances across the text, leaving readers wondering what comes next for these characters. For Feng, who maintains contact with several of her interviewees, this was a driving factor behind telling these stories. She wanted to not only be able to reveal these people longitudinally, she wanted to spotlight characters whose lives and experiences reflected the stories she told in her reporting. As Feng put it, “I wanted to highlight the inherent diversity and dynamism of people in China, both from a political standpoint but also cultural, linguistic, a gender perspective as well.”

Another key motivation for writing the book was uplifting the voices and emotional inner worlds of Chinese speaking people. Feng pointed out that there is currently a wealth of reporting from other non-English speaking parts of the world, contrasting the relative dearth of such storytelling that originates in Asia. Recognizing the constraints that hinder foreign and native reporters’ ability to produce meaningful reporting from China, which ultimately resulted in Feng herself moving to Taiwan before returning to the U.S., she noted, “I wanted to give readers a sense of what it felt like to be there and what it felt like to be those people, because that’s ultimately the act of empathy that I wanted to create in the writing.”

Setting the stage for dialogue

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The second half of the engagement opened the floor to questions from the audience. Attendees solicited Feng’s perspective on the direction and trajectory of modern Chinese politics, the place this new book will occupy in the canon of books written by journalists about China, how her personal history and experience at Duke contributed to her willingness and ability to confidently blaze new trails as a young female journalist abroad in the world, how stories from China can resonate with audiences in the U.S., how Feng’s own background as a Chinese American shaped her views of similarities and differences between the two countries, recommendations for current sources of news being produced by Mandarin speakers for Chinese as well as global audiences, and the legacy of VOA and Radio Free Asia serving as a two-way window between China and western media outlets.

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Summing up her observations from the book, Feng stated, ”All of these slogans now that are out there in Chinese state media and in policymaking, I felt if there was a theme that tied them all together, it was about ultimately how Chinese people should think of themselves and see their role in the bigger Chinese building project. I try to make the argument in the book that that seeps into every aspect of identity and how people live.” Feng concluded, “There is, to me, this really interesting notion that identity is security. That, by creating a strong identity, you also create a strong nation. I hadn’t seen that in previous Chinese leaders; it’s been at the forefront of Xi Jinping’s China.”

Watch a recording of Emily's conversation with Eileen Chow

 

The events were organized by Duke’s Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI) with support from the departments of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) and Cultural Anthropology as well as the programs in Asian American & Diaspora Studies and International Comparative Studies.

About Emily Feng

Emily Feng is an award-winning international correspondent for NPR. She is a regular contributor to NPR podcasts and member stations and a frequent guest on U.S. and BBC radio and television programs. Previously based in Beijing and Taipei for NPR, Feng now lives in Washington, D.C. She is an alumna of Duke University (T ’15), where she was a double-major in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies as well as Public Policy (Sanford). In 2024, Emily received the Hugo Shong Reporting Asia Award from Boston University, given to a journalist who exhibits "the highest standards of international journalism in a series of reports on matters of importance specific to Asia.” In 2023, Emily won the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, given annually by WBUR to a rising public media journalist 35 years of age or younger. Other awards include the Shorenstein Journalism Award (2022) and two Human Rights Press awards. In 2021, she was a finalist for the Livingston Award.