Xiao Liu

Xiao Liu’s research focuses on the social and cultural history of information technology and digital media in contemporary China. Her research has been sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and other national and international grants. Her first monograph, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), unearths a heretofore untold history (1978-1989) of the deep engagements of Deng’s China in anticipating the coming of an information society even before the popularization of the internet and the rise of digital economy in China, and thus provides an indispensable historical framework to understand China’s investment and rise in information power today. She has also published multiple peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals such as Grey Room and Social Identities. She is co-editing a special issue of the journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on the topic of (inter-)Asian infrastructures, based on a workshop sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in 2019. Currently during the year of 2019-2020, she is a fellow at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the World Economic Forum working on data-policy related projects with key stakeholders across public and private sectors and the civil society. During her Wilson China Fellowship term, she will be working on a project to study the governance space of personal data in China.