[3] In 1976, Liu was elected to membership in the Academia Sinica (Taiwan),[4] and served as chairman of its advisory committee of its Institute of Modern History.
In 1988 he delivered the Ch'ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture at New Asia College[5] Liu was born in Beijing.
He then worked for six years in the United Nations Secretariat as a translator before returning to Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow and Instructor.
[1] Modern China: A Bibliographic Guide to Chinese Works, 1898-1937 (Harvard University Press, 1950), edited with John Fairbank, was Liu's first major publication.
Reviewers praised these volumes [10] Harvard University Press published his monograph, Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862-1874, in 1962, and he returned to the area of late nineteenth century political reform in several later studies.
But he objects that there was not one, single "orthodoxy," but rather a "process," one that should be a verb, in which emperors, magistrates, lineage elders, teachers, and fathers tried to "correct" others by imposing their authority.
[11] A later volume, edited with Richard Hon-Chun Shek, was Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004).
He regarded parties as a potential seminar with refreshments," however his wife recalled that he loved opera, in particular Gilbert and Sullivan.