Dr. Ye Liu's research focuses on systems of inequality-how culture and policy reproduce education and gender inequalities in contemporary China. Her first book ‘Higher Education, Meritocracy and Inequality in China’ (Springer, 2016) explores educational policies and the notion of meritocracy intersect to reproduce socioeconomic, gender and geographical inequalities through China’s notorious gaokao selection.  Her work also investigates the implications of China’s shifting demographic policies- from the one-child policy, to the recent two-child and three-child policies on gender inequality in the workplace, family life, work-family and intergenerational relationships.

She is currently writing a book manuscript about siblingless urban women from the one-child generation and on how patriarchy still holds those women back during their adult life course transitions to the labour market, marriage and motherhood. 

Her work has been published in Work, Employment & Society, the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Comparative Education Review, Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education and the Journal International Education and Development.

Outside academia, Ye Liu has written for the Conversation, Foreign Affairs and the MUSE. Her research featured in the Financial Times, the Guardian, BBC News, the Protocol, the ChinaFile, the Reuters News and the Times Higher Education. She also appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, the BBC Why Factor, the National Committee of the US-China Relations Podcast and the China Changing Festival at the Southbank Centre.

Dr. Ye Liu is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Development, King’s College London. Prior to King’s, she was a Senior Lecturer in International Education at Bath Spa University between 2013 and 2016, and was a lecturer of Contemporary Chinese Studies and Director of the BA programme in Chinese Studies at the University College Cork, Ireland from 2012 to 2013. The recipient of early-career awards (the 2014 Junior Sociologist Prize by the Research Committee on Women in Society of the ISA and the 2014 SRHE Newer Researcher Award), Ye Liu holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Sociology from the Institute of Education, University of London (now UCL Institute of Education).