CWP alum Zoe Zongyuan Liu USA congressional testimony on overdose deaths
“Overdose deaths fell sharply in 2024 and, according to provisional federal data, the decline consistent in 2025. But 70,000 Americans still died. That is progress, not victory. The death tolls have fallen, but the supply chain that makes illicit fentanyl easy to scale remains adaptive and cross-border, ” says Zongyuan Zoe Liu, PhD, CFA CFR China expert, in her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Zongyuan Zoe Liu is Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Her work focuses on international political economy, global financial markets, sovereign wealth funds, supply chains of critical minerals, development finance, emerging markets, energy and climate change policy, and East Asia-Middle East relations. Dr. Liu’s regional expertise is in East Asia, specifically China and Japan, and the Middle East, specifically Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Dr. Liu is the author of Can BRICS De-dollarize the Global Financial System? (Cambridge University Press) and Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press).
Prior to joining CFR, Dr. Liu was an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington, DC, where she taught courses on global economy, economic statecraft, and Chinese foreign policy. She joined the Bush School after post-doctoral fellowships at the Columbia-Harvard “China and the World Program” and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Dr. Liu was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and a research associate at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. She was also a visiting research fellow at the Institute for International Monetary Affairs in Tokyo, Bank of Mitsubishi-UFJ, and the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi. She taught courses on Asian energy security and political risk analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Liu received her PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University and her MA in international relations from the George Washington University Elliott School of International Studies. She received her BA in history from Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China. Dr. Liu is also a CFA charterholder.
