In the 1920s Liu wrote several historical articles for the "Critical Review" ("Hsuehheng" 學衡), a journal that was founded in 1922 at National Southeastern University (later renamed National Central University and Nanjing University) . In some of these articles he defended the value of traditional historical scholarship, disagreeing with Gu Jiegang and other advocates of the Doubting Antiquity School, who doubted the reliability of ancient Chinese historical records. Liu's "History of Chinese Culture" ("Zhongguo wenhua shi" 中國文化史), a cultural history of China from times immemorial to the 1920s, was first serialized in the "Critical Review" from 1925 to 1929 before being published as a book in 1932. Though Liu's scholarship is usually viewed as conservative, his book laid the foundation for a discussion of China as a cultural entity rather than a racial one as was common at the time.