Liu (Leo) He

Expertise

• China
• Liberalism
• US-China Relations
• Civil Society
• Oral History
• International Development
• Global Health
• Chinese Liberal Thought
• Intellectual History
• Modern Chinese History
• History of US-China Relations
• Soviet History
• Stable Totalitarianism
• Artificial Intelligence

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  Liu (Leo) He

  Research Fellow

  Short Bio

  Liu He (Leo) is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in its Program on the US, China, and the World. His current scholarship examines the evolution of global knowledge on China through oral history interviews. He is also the host of JF Pod (季风播客), co-produced with JF Books in Washington, DC.

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  Mid-Length Bio

  Liu He (Leo) is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in its Program on the US, China, and the World. He is also the host of JF Pod (季风播客), a Chinese-language podcast featuring conversations with Chinese thinkers and cultural figures, coproduced with JF Books in Washington, DC.

  His current scholarship examines the evolution of global knowledge on China. With support from the Hoover Library & Archives, he is compiling an oral history collection based on in-depth visual and audio interviews with leading foreign China specialists. Excerpts are regularly published on the Substack channel, Peking Hotel.

  From 2019 to 2023, He lived in Beijing, where he worked to address economic, health, and educational inequities in rural China. During this period, he consulted for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on health policy advocacy before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and founded Charity Box, China’s first evidence-based charity evaluator. As CEO, he built the organization from the ground up, and collaborated with prominent philanthropists, foundations, media outlets, universities, think tanks, and government agencies.

  He has spoken at universities as well as corporate and academic forums, and his work has been featured by The Wall Street Journal, PBS, Forbes, McKinsey China, China Books Review, Initium Media, Caixin, ifeng, and the China Foundation Forum, among others. He briefly worked in venture capital in China and once served as assistant to a leading Chinese pro-democracy activist.

  He holds an MA from Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar and a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford.

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  To view, the complete bio visit https://www.hoover.org/profiles/liu-leo-he.