Prof. Liu graduated from the National University of Singapore and has been with the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University since 2013. Currently, he been serving as the Assistant Dean of the School and is titled as the Yat-sen Pioneer Scholar. His diverse research areas encompass regional studies, globalisation, industrial upgrading, and AI/big data techniques, spanning the interdisciplinary fields of economic geography, tourism management, and information systems. He has often been labelled as a leading scholar of strategic coupling in economic geography and sentimental computation in tourism.
To date, Prof. Liu has published over 100 articles in both Chinese and English in highly influential journals, including Nature Climate Change, Annals of Tourism Research, Regional Studies, and Review of International Political Economy. Besides, his work in tourism-led poverty alleviation has also garnered numerous accolades. He was awarded the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award three times by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China in 2018, 2022, and 2023. His endeavours on tourism-oriented poverty alleviation in rural China were awarded the Best Practices in Rural Revitalisation Through Tourism in 2022 by the World Tourism Organisation, and the Global Best Poverty Reduction Practices Award in 2023 jointly by the International Poverty Reduction Centre in China, the World Bank, and four other UN-related institutions.
With these achievements, he has actively engaged in a wide range of services for academic communities, serving as the Chief Secretary of the Commission on Tourism Geography of the Geographical Society of China; the Chief Secretary of the Tourism Poverty Alleviation Alliance from the Ministry of Education, China; the vice editor-in-chief for the journal of Tourism Forum (in Chinese) and associate editor for the journal of Humanities of Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature).