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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Recent demonstrations in Tibet prompted Chinese authorities to crack down on journalists. They have blocked access to the region and sent "minders" to follow reporters who were trying to cover the unrest.
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Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party suffers a severe defeat in parliamentary elections, losing control of the upper house of parliament. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he will stay in office.
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Millions of Chinese women bound their feet, a status symbol that allowed them to marry into money. Footbinding was banned in 1912, but some women continued to do it in secret. Some of the last survivors are still living in a village in Southern China.
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U.S. businessman Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911. His blockbuster 1937 book, 400 Million Customers, recently has spawned a crop of imitators, and many of his insights into doing business in China still hold true today.
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China struggles to prepare for a baby boom as it ushers in the especially lucky "golden pig year." But could that supposed luck turn into a curse? -
China has just 76 traditional opera troupes today, compared to 2,000 four decades ago. But it has an unlikely new champion: a Briton who has devoted more than a decade to mastering Beijing opera and bringing it to new audiences. -
Shanghai is changing at breakneck speed. That transformation, along with the hope, fear, greed and nostalgia that it engenders, is the stuff of novels. Three authors talk about the inspiration that China's most exciting city provides them.
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As Shanghai undergoes a radical facelift, tens of thousands of residents are forcibly displaced from their homes each year. Many say real-estate developers are conspiring with officials to seize property for little or no compensation.
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Qiu Xiaolong's English-language detective stories track Shanghai's transformation into a modern metropolis and how ordinary citizens are struggling to cope with the rapid pace of change. -
As they get richer, China's entrepreneurs are becoming more politically active. In some parts of the country, 80 percent of elected village heads are local businessmen, blurring the lines between business and politics.
