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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Some 200 million farmers have left behind their families and fields to forge a living in China's booming cities. The phenomenon has been described as the biggest internal migration in the history of the world. -
On average, rural Chinese are poorer than their cousins in the city. But one village a few hours' drive away from Shanghai has come up with its own route to prosperity -- and other areas hope to learn from it. -
South Korea indicts the chairman of one of its biggest companies, Hyundai Motor group. He is charged with setting up a $100 million fund to bribe politicians. The scandal has already claimed one life, a government official who committed suicide. It also threatens a pillar of the Korean economy.
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Thousands of South Koreans demonstrated in Seoul on Sunday, protesting the expansion of a U.S. military base a few miles south of the city. U.S. forces currently stationed near the demilitarized zone and in Seoul will be transferred to the larger facility in Pyongtaek, a city of 350,000 people. Twenty people were arrested in the largely peaceful demonstration.
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South Korean television shows and music are finding millions of fans in China and other Asian countries, boosting sales and the country's image across the region. Some are even having cosmetic surgery to appear more Korean. -
Ties between the United States and South Korea are tested by a North Korean scheme to pass counterfeit U.S. $100 bills in Seoul markets. Staring across the DMZ at a potential nuclear threat, Seoul would prefer not to North Korea on the financial issue. -
A new show that has opened in South Korea, Yodok Story, takes on an unlikely topic for a musical: prison camps in Stalinist North Korea. The director and choreographer are North Korean -- and both were once prisoners in the vast gulag system that holds an estimated 200,000 people. -
Like everything else Internet-related in China, podcasts are exploding in popularity. From film parodies to pornography, audio and video downloads are pushing the boundaries of the law and decency. -
China has more than 30 million bloggers, by some estimates. A few are political. Some are unusual, such as Mumu, a Communist Party member who has clips of herself doing sexy dances. But the typical Chinese blogger is more like Jasmine Gu ("It's all about me, myself and my life.")
