Obituary

Let our collective remembering of Professor James Hou-Fu Liu be a blessing. Jim passed away on 11 August 2024 in an unfortunate accident that started while snorkelling off a beach in Indonesia. He was survived by his wife Belinda Bonzon-Liu and daughter Brianna Bonzon-Liu. His other surviving kin include his mother Liu Liu An-Yun and brother Liu Chieh-Fu (Jeff). In a broader sense, members of the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP), right from its inception in 1995, have been his kin. At various periods for the last 20 or so years, he had served as Secretary General, Treasurer, President, Conference Organiser, Summer School Mentor, Advisor to Executive Committee, Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editor of its flagship Asian Journal of Social Psychology (AJSP) .... He and the multitude of co-serving office-bearers of AASP have left their marks on its developmental trajectory, thereby extending the pioneering contributions made by Yoshi Kashima, Uichol Kim, Susumu Yamaguchi and the late Kwok Leung. In response to current issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Jim and the AASP leadership have initiated a number of large-scale research projects and small group meetings that have further raised AASP's international profile. Jim was born in Taiwan, China, near the city of Taichung (1962), where his parents had made their home after they left Shanghai. His maternal grandfather, according to Jeff, named him 豁夫 (Hou-Fu) with the expectation that he would grow up with a broad mind and magnanimous temperament (豁达大度 Huo-da-da-du) like that of an ancient emperor with the same family name, Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty. While Jim was still a young child, the family moved to Carbondale, Illinois, USA (1966). There his father Liu Shu-Hsien took up an appointment in philosophy at the Southern Illinois University and rapidly rose to the rank of full professor by 1974. That must have set an example for Jim in his own academic career. The family made a sojourn in Hong Kong (around 1973–1975), where Jim picked up Cantonese as his third language after Mandarin and English. While there, he attended KGV School. Upon graduating from the Carbondale Community School (1980), Jim attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (Engineering) (1984). He then worked with Hughes Aircraft/ Los Angeles as a computer scientist until 1986. A year later, he and Belinda were married (1987). In a decisive turn to his career, Jim came back to academia, this time to complete an MA, then in 1992 a PhD in psychology from UCLA. In the same PhD class was Minoru Karasawa, the current President of AASP. This was followed by a Post-doc Fellowship at the Florida Atlantic University (1992–1994). Around this period of time, Jim studied and researched with some powerhouses of social and political psychology, including Marilyn Brewer, Bibb Latane and Jim Sidanius. The author of this obituary had no hesitation in hiring Jim as a Lecturer in Psychology at the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand (1994).1 Like his father before him, Jim rapidly rose to the rank of full professor by 2010. From 2003 to 2015, he was Deputy Director then Co-Director of VUW's vibrant Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research. In 2015, he was head-hunted to take up a Distinguished Professorship and became Head of the School of Psychology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. He remained at Massey to the very end. During his tenure at VUW, Jim was an active and productive collaborator in an applied practice research project on positive ageing and intergenerational relations in the Pakeha (European), Māori and Chinese communities. Through this and his subsequent association with the Māori community facilitated by Te Ripowai Higgins and many others, Jim fostered research and teaching in indigenous psychology and mentored a number of Māori PhD students, among whom were Awanui Te Huia and Arama Rata. His other early PhD students at VUW included Marc Wilson and Sammyh Khan. He received the Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, not long after Brianna was born to the happy couple (2001). Jim's openness to new perspectives and talent to critically synthesise them shone through his research work. These personal qualities, signified by his Chinese name, have been instrumental to the development of three major areas of research at VUW. The first one, already referred to above, was indigenous psychology that was making a powerful appearance in Asia inspired by the late Virgilio Enriquez and Kuo-shu Yang, among others. Another was work on social dominance and the legitimisation of inequality across cultures. Underpinning this work was his new-found cross-cultural perspective coupled with his earlier political psychology perspective. Intellectually he was an Asian American in as much as Asia and North America, roughly speaking, were the home grounds of the two perspectives, respectively. The third area of research was the social/cultural representations of history and social identities. This research was informed by social representations theory and the social identity approach, both of which were developed in European social psychology as meta-theoretical systems. Intellectually, then, Jim also embodied developments in Europe apart from those in Asia and North America. Running through all his three major areas of research was his persistent concern with Aotearoa New Zealand, on which he has published extensively. Jim's multi-perspective and integrative approach to psychological inquiry has been nurtured through collaboration with his father, the late Professor Liu Shu-Hsien (刘述先), who himself was an eminent figure of the third generation of neo-Confucians. Together they co-authored several papers. In their 1997 paper, for example, they proposed two Confucian philosophical principles for synthesising insights from different paradigms in psychology and other social sciences. Li-i-fen-shu (理一分殊 One principle, multiple manifestations) would allow multiple methods of inquiry and multiple manifestations of cultural reality to derive from one source, whereas T'ien-jen-ho-i (天人合一 Heaven and humanity in union) would relate each act and actor to holistic processes of nature and interpersonal harmony. It would have been gravely remiss of this obituary not to pay tribute to the father–son nexus. In recent times, James was looking at global consciousness in culturally Chinese societies, as well as continuing research on the Digital Influence project, involving 40+ countries around the world. The Digital Influence project involves collaboration with social psychologists from around the world. It examines a wide range of social attitudes and behaviors, including mass media usages, trust in different people and institutions, and prejudice and discrimination. ... not only were we inspired by his work and firm anchoring in philosophy, but we were also encouraged by his vision and optimism about our role as Psychologists in caring about the future of the planet. GC maps an individual's cosmopolitanism, openness to multiple cultural experiences and a pan-humanity level of self-categorisation onto a variety of social psychological topics such as environmental attitudes, intergroup biases and pandemic prevention behaviours. A report by the GC research group led by Jim has been published in a 2023 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which was dedicated to multi-disciplinary synthesis. The report is a notable contribution from social psychology. It represents yet another application of Jim's talent in synthesising multiple perspectives. Much of Jim's teaching career was dedicated to mentoring junior scholars in their research and publishing, often with an applied practice emphasis on social issues. He has done this in New Zealand, mainland China, Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, among others. At the time of writing, Jim's Google Scholar counts exceeded 18,000 with an h-index of 71. These are impressive markers of accomplishment, particularly when taking into account his relatively short career in social psychology and extremely time-consuming editorial services to AJSP, Political Psychology and other publications. Underlying the impressive figures is the huge number of research collaborators from numerous countries and regions. Jim's charisma, ability for interpersonal connectivity, entrepreneurship and generous hospitality are very much in evidence. In our eyes, his great legacy was the network he built all over the world and the young psychologists he mentored. His research was important, but the people he did the research with were much more precious to him. Many of whom have left their footprints in the couple's Auckland home and many more have been introduced by Jim to Belinda and Brianna during the Liu family's globe-trotting over the years. In Cicero's words, Jim had life's ‘fill’. Amen

Obituary · Theology · Community Health and Development · Cultural Differences and Values · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Representations and Identity