Kevin Ziyu Liu is a researcher, writer, and teacher whose work explores the intersections of media technology, infrastructure, and social governance in China. His research examines how technological systems—data, platforms, infrastructure, and governance practices—reshape social life, political imagination, and everyday experiences of modernity.

He received his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2023, where he spent six years developing an interdisciplinary foundation in political economy, cultural studies, and critical media studies. His scholarship has evolved from studying digital media and the political economy of China’s tech industry to a broader inquiry into the historical formation and lived realities of digital governance. His first book, Digital China from Below, is currently under peer review; it examines how the national vision of “Digital China” becomes real, and unstable, once it is built into the life of a single province.

His current research turns to the deeper history beneath that story. Since the 1960s, the mountains of southwest China have carried a series of national projects built for very different futures, including wartime industrial dispersal, long-distance electricity transmission, and now large-scale data infrastructure, often on the same ground, sometimes in the same buildings. His second book project traces how these successive layers of construction, institutions, and memory accumulate, and what gets carried forward, abandoned, or rediscovered as one national vision gives way to the next. The project combines archival and enterprise-history research, oral history with the people who built and worked in these systems, and attention to the region’s karst landscape and its cultural production—film, workers’ writing, local museums—as evidence in their own right.

His work has appeared in journals including The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, The Political Economy of Communication, and Global Media and China, while his public writing and interviews have also reached broader audiences beyond academia. At the center of his work is a belief that meaningful scholarship grows through engaged observation, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participation in the worlds one studies. This commitment has led him beyond conventional academic spaces into conversations and collaborations with artists, curators, journalists, and public intellectuals. He has also written for public-facing outlets such as The Thinkers and has been interviewed by media organizations including Initium Media. He sees research not simply as critique, but as a way of paying close attention—to institutions, infrastructures, histories, and the subtle ways technology reorganizes social life.

Kevin is an active participant in the international scholarly community. In July 2026, he co-convened, with Wang Hongzhe of Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, the 2026 International Conference on Digital Media Infrastructure and Local High-Quality Development, co-hosted by the School of Communication at Guizhou University and the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. Keynote speakers included Jack Linchuan Qiu (Nanyang Technological University), Hu Yong (Peking University), Bingchun Meng (London School of Economics and Political Science), Tung-Hui Hu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Lu Miao (Lingnan University). He also regularly presents at conferences such as the International Communication Association (ICA), International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and Association for Asian Studies (AAS), while also serving as a reviewer for leading academic journals including Big Data & Society, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Contemporary China, Television & New Media, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

After eight years in the United States, Kevin returned home in 2024 and now teaches at Guizhou University as an associate professor. He continues to write, teach, and pursue collaborations across academic, public, and creative worlds—always looking for new questions, new conversations, and new ways of seeing.