Prior to joining PolyU, Dr Liu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and a post-doc fellow in the Department of Geography and David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Dr Liu was a recipient of China-U.S. Scholars Program (CUSP) Grant, funded by Harvard-Yenching Institute and Ford Foundation, among others. She is also a member of the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS).

Dr Liu's research concerns how the dynamics of social forces such as social networks, communal ethics, cultural values, public opinion, collective action and discourse interact with techniques of state power to shape state-society relations. She is interested in policy implementation, contentious politics, rural politics, and environmental politics, with particular reference to China. In terms of methodology, she specializes in ethnographic methods. 

Based on interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations, her work has been published in high-ranking and flagship journals, including The China Quarterly, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and Political Geography. One of her ongoing projects examines the role of political brokerage in mediating state-society conflicts with mixed methods. Another one investigates the framing strategies of states to promote environmentally controversial projects with quantitative text analysis methods. These studies contribute to political sociology by revealing inconspicuous but significant mechanisms of social actions, testing theories across different social structures, and conceptualizing novel theoretical models.

• PhD, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• MPhil, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• BA, China Agricultural University