Chinese President Xi Jinping who doubles as Communist Party and military chief has vowed to go after powerful “tigers” and lowly “flies” as part of an extensive crackdown on government corruption. But is the crackdown losing steam after ensnaring Zhou Yongkang, retired security tsar and a former member of the Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, and General Xu Caihou, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission who concurrently sat on the Party’s Politburo?
Benjamin Lim is Reuters’ North Asia Specialist Correspondent. Since joining Reuters in 1991, Lim has been consistently involved in breaking some of the biggest news out of Taiwan and China. In 2007, Lim won Reuters’ Scoop of the Year award for correctly predicting the new line-up of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, three weeks before the official announcement. He was named Reuters Text Reporter of the Year in 2011 and together with the Hong Kong bureau, won Reuters’ Reporting Team of the Year in 2014. Lim was also a three-time winner of Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) honourable mention and a 2015 finalist of the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia.
Notably in 1997, two days before the Chinese State media officially confirmed the then paramount leader Deng Xiaopings’s death, Lim broke the news and gave the world a heads-up on Deng’s impending death and the disbandment of Deng’s office. In 2005, he also broke news of the death of Zhao Ziyang — the high ranking Communist Party politician who was purged in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — and of the publication of Zhao’s secret memoirs in 2009. He was instrumental in Reuters obtaining an exclusive interview with then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao whose comments on China’s overheating economy sent financial markets across the world tumbling in 2004. Lim was among a small select group of foreign journalists who interviewed then Chinese President Hu Jintao ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He also interviewed numerous world leaders including the Philippine President Benigno Aquino, and his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and the then Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian.
Lim was also previously Reuters Beijing and Taipei bureau chief. Born in Manila to Chinese parents, Lim studied industrial management engineering in the Philippines and business administration in Taiwan.
