Zongyuan (Zoe) Liu
Postdoctoral Research Scholar, The Fletcher School
Zongyuan (Zoe) Liu is currently a postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at The Fletcher School. She previously served as a postdoctoral research scholar at the Columbia-Harvard ‘China and the World’ Program. She received her PhD from Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include International Political Economy, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Economy, with an area expertise in East Asia. Her doctoral dissertation addresses the rising profile of Sovereign Wealth Funds in global financial markets, with a particular focus on the role of crisis and shocks in the establishment of SWFs in China and Japan. Zoe’s current book project is based upon her dissertation and is motivated by an empirical puzzle: China and Japan are the two largest foreign exchange holding countries, but why is it that China has established several sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) while Japan has none? To solve this empirical puzzle, Zoe’s research systematically examines when, why, and how China used its foreign exchange reserves to capitalize several state-owned investment funds for the purpose of advancing a state-prioritized agenda in global financial markets. From a comparative perspective, her work analyzes how China’s rising financial activism and its practice of financial statecraft in support of the Belt and Road Initiative, has elicited a policy response from Japan, expressed in the subtle transformation of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation into a funding vehicle to support a new Japanese national strategy of infrastructure export. Zoe’s research has been generously supported by Zartman Fellowship, Edwin O. Reischauer Fellowship, George L. Abernethy Pre-doctoral Research Fellowship, Association of Asian Studies, CFA Institute Scholarship, and Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. Fellowship.
At SAIS, Zoe works at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and has done intensive research in Persian Gulf-East Asia relations with a special focus on energy and finance, infrastructure finance, Eurasia trans-regional economic interdependence, Asian energy security, and the proliferation of “New Silk Road” campaigns in a number of countries, including but not limited to China and Japan.
Zoe has taught a wide range of courses to a diverse group of students. As a teaching fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS, she has taught both qualitative and quantitative courses, including Asian Energy Security, Political Risk in Asia, and Introduction to Econometrics using STATA. She has also worked as a teaching assistant for a variety of courses, including Applied Econometrics, International Finance, International Development, Time-series Econometrics, and Risk in International Politics and Economics.
Zoe holds an MA in International Relations from the George Washington University, the Elliott School of International Studies. She did her undergraduate in China and holds a BA in History. She is also a CFA Level 3 candidate. She is fluent in Chinese and English, and reads Japanese.