Louisa Lim
Beijing Correspondent Louisa Lim is currently attending the University of Michigan as a Knight-Wallace Fellow. She will return to her regular role in 2014.
Based in Beijing, NPR foreign correspondent Louisa Lim finds China a hugely diverse, vibrant, fascinating place. "Everywhere you look and everyone you talk to has a fascinating story," she notes, adding that she's "spoiled with choices" of stories to cover. In her reports, Lim takes "NPR listeners to places they never knew existed. I want to give them an idea of how China is changing and what that might mean for them."
Lim opened NPR's Shanghai bureau in February 2006, but she's reported for NPR from up Tibetan glaciers and down the shaft of a Shaanxi coalmine. She made a very rare reporting trip to North Korea, covered illegal abortions in Guangxi province, and worked on the major multimedia series on religion in China "New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China." Lim has been part of NPR teams who multiple awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Peabody and two Edward R. Murrow awards, for their coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics. She's been honored in the Human Rights Press Awards, as well as winning prizes for her multimedia work.
In 1995, Lim moved to Hong Kong and worked at the Eastern Express newspaper until its demise six months later and then for TVB Pearl, the local television station. Eventually Lim joined the BBC, working first for five years at the World Service in London, and then as a correspondent at the BBC in Beijing for almost three years.
Lim found her path into journalism after graduating with a degree in Modern Chinese studies from Leeds University in England. She worked as an editor, polisher, and translator at a state-run publishing company in China, a job that helped her strengthen her Chinese. Simultaneously, she began writing for a magazine and soon realized her talents fit perfectly with journalism.
NPR London correspondent Rob Gifford, who previously spent six years reporting from China for NPR, thinks that Lim is uniquely suited for his former post. "Not only does Louisa have a sharp journalistic brain," Gifford says, "but she sees stories from more than one angle, and can often open up a whole new understanding of an issue through her reporting. By listening to Louisa's reports, NPR listeners will certainly get a feel for what 21st century China is like. It is no longer a country of black and white, and the complexity is important, a complexity that you always feel in Louisa's intelligent, nuanced reporting."
Out of all of her reporting, Lim says she most enjoys covering stories that are quirky or slightly offbeat. However, she gravitates towards reporting on arts stories with a deeper significance. For example, early in her tenure at NPR, Lim highlighted a musical on stage in Seoul, South Korea, based on a North Korean prison camp. The play, and Lim's piece, highlighted the ignorance of many South Koreans of the suffering of their northern neighbors.
Married with a son and a daughter, Lim recommends any NPR listeners travelling to Shanghai stop by a branch of her husband's Yunnan restaurant, Southern Barbarian, where they can snack on deep fried bumblebees, a specialty from that part of southwest China. In Beijing, her husband owns and runs what she calls "the first and best fish and chip shop in China", Fish Nation.
-
A U.N. report says North Korea has more food than in previous years. But North Koreans who spoke to NPR say conditions are still dire. Food has become too expensive for many North Koreans, and people are dying of hunger, they say. -
The sudden death of North Korea's leader, the ascension of his little-known son, and a rocket-launch failure marked a rocky year for the reclusive nation. In rare interviews, several North Koreans tell NPR that expectations of a better life have not been met. -
If the new Communist Party leadership in China has its way, the country will be saying zaijian to droning speeches and over-the-top red carpet receptions. These are the first concrete signs of change since China's new party leader, Xi Jinping, took power last month. -
She is a wildly popular singer, AIDS activist and major general in the Chinese army. Now, Peng Liyuan is slated to add another title: first lady of China. Peng's husband, Xi Jinping, is expected to become the country's president next year. Military garb has replaced her fabulous costumes as China's image-makers ensure she doesn't overshadow Xi. -
The man who is about to become China's new leader, Xi Jinping, is well-traveled. In his current role as vice president, he's been to 41 countries, more than any other Chinese leader-to-be. In all his globetrotting, he's kept a soft spot for Muscatine, a small town in Iowa. -
A famous documentary maker has inspired more than a hundred young people to take part in an oral history project to collect peasants' stories of the Great Famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An estimated 36 million people died during the famine, which the Chinese government blamed on natural disasters. -
For 10 years, journalist Yang Jinsheng secretly collected official evidence about the terrible famine in China a half-century ago. In his chilling book Tombstone — which is banned in his homeland — Yang estimates that 36 million people died of starvation and other causes during the famine, even as grain exports continued. -
Xi Jinping is the son of a prominent political figure who fell out of favor in the 1960s. Just a teenager at the time, Xi was sent off to a remote rural area where he lived in a hillside cave for seven years. -
China began its once-a-decade leadership transition as the 18th Communist Party Congress opened Thursday. The message focused on cleaning up government corruption, which President Hu Jintao said could be "fatal" to the party and the state. -
Among Chinese citizens, there is a sense of frustration and fascination that Americans have the right to vote for their own leaders.
-
China's foreign policy has appeared increasingly assertive recently. What isn't clear is whether this is part of a coherent plan or just an outgrowth of China's increasing stature in Asia and beyond. -
China spares no effort or expense to suppress individuals and groups that dare to raise grievances. From the government's perspective, this pervasive security system has maintained order. But is it undermining long-term stability?
