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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Chinese leaders are pouring money into research and development in a bid to rejoin the ranks of the world's top technological innovators. Beijing is also luring back Chinese scientists from overseas. But money and manpower may not be enough. -
China's 12 million Catholics have been bitterly divided for decades. Some belong to Beijing-sanctioned churches, while others worship in "underground" churches loyal to the Vatican. Even though Pope Benedict XVI has urged reconciliation, China's Catholics have struggled to follow his instructions. -
Alongside China's astonishing economic boom, an almost unnoticed religious boom has been taking place. The collapse of the communist ideology created a void that has left many Chinese looking for a value system. NPR looks at the trend in a five-part series beginning Monday on All Things Considered. -
Patients are traveling to China to receive experimental stem-cell treatments not offered in the United States. One company claims it has restored vision to blind children, raising controversy in both China and the U.S.
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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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Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visits the Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of World War II's end. The shrine honors many who participated in the war, including a number of convicted war criminals. Koizumi's visits to the shrine have been greeted by protests from Korea and China, countries invaded by Japan.
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Japan steps up pressure on North Korea, warning Sunday that "all options are on the table" if the communist state test-launches a long-range missile. The last North Korean missile launch in 1998 sparked a debate about Japan's national defense and strengthened its nationalist sentiment.
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Just how swanky does your office need to be? That's a loaded question in parts of China, where some district governments have built huge, palatial headquarters. There has long been unrest in China over waste and mismanagement in local government. But as the country's economy has expanded, the problem only seems to get worse. -
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.
