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.
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China's one-child only policy and historic preference for boys has led to a surplus of marriageable Chinese men. Young women are holding out for better apartments, cars and the like from potential spouses. And prospective in-laws are socking away savings to try to appeal to a future daughter-in-law. -
With its missile units on standby and its hotlines cut to South Korea, North Korea continues to stoke tensions on the peninsula. Even China, North Korea's main ally, is now on board with sanctions. -
China's new president has vowed to crack down on corruption. One widespread practice involves paying bribes to get high-level positions in politics or the bureaucracy. -
North Korea has cut off a hotline with South Korea, as its southern neighbor begins a large annual military exercise with the U.S. North Korea also announced that the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War is no longer valid, though South Korean officials have cast doubt on this. This comes after a week of inflamed North Korean rhetoric, including threats to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the U.S.
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Kim Lee posted a photo of her battered face online, and has become a national icon in China. She won a divorce, a financial settlement and a restraining order against her Chinese husband, a famous author and English teacher. -
Tales of Machiavellian office politics are all the rage in China, where "bureaucracy lit" is flying off bookstore shelves. The books are read as both entertainment and as how-to guides for aspiring civil servants. Pioneers of the genre offer a path to success in China's corridors of power. -
Defying international warnings, North Korea successfully fired a long-range rocket on Wednesday. The launch was something of a surprise because Pyongyang had indicated technical problems might delay it.
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North Korea appears to have taken a step forward in its long-range missile program. The country has fired a long-range rocket in spite of warnings from the U.S. and the United Nations.
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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. -
Among Chinese citizens, there is a sense of frustration and fascination that Americans have the right to vote for their own leaders.
