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.
-
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in China as part of her six-nation Asia trip. Despite mounting tensions, Clinton emphasized mutual cooperation and strong ties as she visited Beijing.
-
The son of President Bush 41 joked about joining the Communist party, but his post has unleashed serious criticism about the Chinese government. -
The 8,000 graves of Happy Valley cemetery in Hong Kong tell the island's untold early history through the lives of pirates and prostitutes, missionaries and merchants. NPR correspondent Louisa Lim's mother devoted a decade to chronicling the last resting place of Hong Kong's earliest settlers. -
England's top Premier League teams are playing exhibition games, running soccer clinics for kids and sponsoring fan parties in China, drawn by its massive economic potential. Newly moneyed owners of Chinese teams are snagging big-name European players in a sport that's favored by China's political elite. -
China has charged Gu Kailai, the wife of disgraced party official Bo Xilai, with the murder of a British businessman — the latest sensational twist in China's biggest political scandal in decades.
-
In China, authorities are still counting the cost of heavy weekend floods in Beijing. City officials say three-dozen people died in the flooding, and more than 60,000 houses were damaged. Losses are estimated at nearly $2 billion. But the intangible damage is to the government's credibility.
-
The country's army swore oaths of loyalty to leader Kim Jong Un after he was given the new title of marshal of the nation. This follows the army chief's dismissal. Analysts suspect the announcements mask far deeper changes, but there's disagreement about what those changes are. -
The new figures released by the Chinese government matter to the U.S. because of the way the world economy is so interconnected. Americans import a lot from China, but have also been working to boost exports to other nations, including China.
-
The latest Chinese economic figures are due to be released Thursday night. Most analysts are predicting they'll show that the world's second largest economy is suffering its deepest slowdown since the global financial crisis.
-
Every four years, organizers of the Olympic Games promise that expensive facilities will be put to good use after the crowds depart. But saddled with high maintenance costs, Beijing's Olympic venues, such as the Bird's Nest stadium, are struggling to find an afterlife.
