Zongyuan Zoe Liu is the Maurice R. Greenberg Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Her work focuses on international finance, sovereign wealth funds, industrial policies, and the geoeconomics of energy transition. Her regional expertise is in East Asia and the Middle East. Liu is the author of Can BRICS De-dollarize the Global Financial System? (Cambridge University Press, February 2022) and Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press, June 2023). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) of Columbia University. She is a columnist for Foreign Policy and is also a regular contributor to policy-relevant journals and newspapers such as Foreign Affairs, The International Economy, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. Her research has been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Prior to joining CFR, Liu was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington, D.C. She joined the Bush School after post-doctoral fellowships at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Liu was a Research Fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and a Research Associate at the New York University Stern Center for Sustainable Business. She was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for International Monetary Affairs in Tokyo, Bank of Mitsubishi-UFJ, and the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi.
Liu received her Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and she is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder. Her paper on BRICS collective de-dollarization statecraft received the 2021 Best Paper Award from the International Studies Association (West) annual conference.
