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.
-
Jiang Zemin rose to power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests and leaves a legacy of economic reforms — but also tight political control. -
Malcolm Turnbull was booted from his seat by conservatives in his party. It's the 4th time in the past decade that the country has removed its prime minister. Scott Morrison is the new prime minister.
-
The inventor of Pinyin, a system that converted Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died on Saturday. Zhou Youguang was 111 years old.
-
NewsA commission is investigating complaints by military academy students who say systematic sexual abuse was inflicted on new recruits dating back to the 1970s. -
Suppressing its own people with tanks and guns 25 years ago was a pivotal act of modern China. Beijing hoped economic prosperity would make people forget. But the legacy of Tiananmen remains potent. -
Chen Guang is now an artist, and since early May, he has been held in police detention after staging a performance that was a comment on attempts to expunge the Tiananmen Square massacre from history. -
Students were the driving force behind the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing. China's youth now have other worries, the events of 25 years ago forgotten and buried by time and the government. -
A bullet to the head killed Zhang Xianling's son near Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Since then, she has led a group demanding the truth and accountability for those deaths.
-
The bloody 1989 crackdown in Beijing changed China, NPR's Louisa Lim explains in a new book. She also chronicles the brutal repression that took place in another city — and remained hidden until now. -
Banned during the Cultural Revolution, China's ancient funeral practices are re-emerging — but with new twists. One of China's most famous professional mourners creates modern funerals with Chinese characteristics — burning paper money, wailing and prostrating, karaoke eulogies and strobe lights.
