umagazine issue 18 54 to be of use.’ By gaining admission into the university, he cut the key that opened the door to a new life. ‘Those that got admitted into universities in 1977 and 1978 saw the opportunity as a miracle,’ says Liu. From a Science Major to a Major Force in Criminology Liu has won a clutch of awards and honours. He has been elected to many famous international criminological bodies. Notably, he also founded the most important scholastic exchange platform in Asia for criminologists--the Asian Criminological Society, of which he is the president. He is a prolific writer, with 29 books to his credit as author, editor, or co-editor, 71 journal papers (of which 48 are SSCI/Scoupus indexed), and 36 book chapters. Liu’s undergraduate major was physics. Back then, students were sold on this slogan ‘Learn well your math, physics, and chemistry, and you can go anywhere without fear or insecurity.’ Liu too found himself in the grip of this fever and picked physics. Postgraduation, he discovered, to his disappointment, that career options in physics were severely limited. Physics was old school, with little room for career development. Without a lab for high-grade research, success was hopelessly beyond reach. Though offered a post to teach physics at Ningxia University, Liu turned his mind to an alternative career path. Cutting a Second Key to Life Proud though he was in making a quantum leap from humble tyre factory worker to lofty physics professor, Liu was far from content. He felt a different inner drive. ‘Having come through the social upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, I had thought long and hard about various social and political issues,’ he says. ‘After two years of teaching physics, I decided to change horses midstream and applied for an MA programme in philosophy of science.’ Liu thus took a drastic turn--to a road not yet travelled, where he found unprecedented opportunities. In 1979, China and the United States established diplomatic relations, ushering in a honeymoon period between the two countries. ‘Nankai University invited many American experts to deliver talks, giving me a chance to get to know sociology,’ he says. ‘In 1988, I earned a full scholarship to study in the US.’ Driven by his hunger for knowledge, Liu switched from being a science student to a philosophy of science major, and then spent an additional ten years on another detour into sociology. But even then, academically, he still had not found his true love. This ceaseless search, however, led him to cut his second key that finally opened the door to a new opportunity. During his stay in the US, it was not until after he completed his PhD degree that he began to develop a romance with criminology. ‘The State University of New York at Albany was known as the cradle for criminology. That whiff of intellectual excitement lured me into my lifelong interest in this discipline, just when I was writing my thesis,’ he recalls. Discovering criminology was his second key, the key to a veritable treasure chest. He stayed in the US to dig deeper into criminology. He joined Rhode Island College in 1992, and spent 10 years there climbing the rungs from assistant professor to tenured full professor. But academic security alone did not satisfy him. He wanted more. He still burned with a desire to excel himself. The day before our interview, Prof Liu attended the inauguration ceremony for UM’s new rector Yonghua Song. He was visibly moved by what Rector Song said in his official speech, ‘A university must be driven by its dream, and feed its soul on excellence.’ This apt statement captures the essence of his own life journey. Had he not embarked on his scorched-earth pursuit of self-actualisation, he would probably still be toiling away in a tyre factory in his native Ningxia. The Third Key– Returning to Asia In 2007, the US was in the throes of a financial crisis. That same year, Liu came to UM as a visiting Fulbright Scholar. Near the end of his term, Faculty of Social Sciences Dean Prof Hao Yufan invited him to stay. That was how Liu left his comfort zone in the US where he had been ensconced for the past 15 years. By staying, he traded America for Asia.
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