He was elected a member of the Political Bureau and the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee in 2002.

Liu's passion for ordinary people and communities has stayed with him over the years despite his transition in roles from a journalist to a senior official.

He preferred to investigate the ideological work in rural areas on his own, by train, by bus, or even hitchhiking by tractor to the homes and tents of farmers and herdsmen when he was in charge of publicity of Inner Mongolia in 1986.

"You only get words from the heart when you stay with the people," Liu once explained. "To me, it's a happy thing to hear the truth from the people."

He went deep down to the grassroots every year after he assumed posts at the central level, leaving his footprint in every province, autonomous region and municipality over the years.

To him, what he sees and experiences by himself is more convincing than what he is told.

He dislikes official jargons, empty talks or ostentation in media.

"Journalists should always be on the road, go for the scenes and to communities," Liu has said, urging the press to write short and newsworthy stories and express people's voice.

To turn things around, the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee launched a nationwide campaign in 2011, encouraging journalists to go to factories, farms, schools and local communities to cover grassroots stories and improve their style of work and writing.

"We should write stories about ordinary people and speak out for them," he once said. "Journalists should bear in mind the questions: 'For whom do I work? On whom can I depend and who am I?' Only by handling such issues properly can we seek the origin of our power and obtain support from the people with the broadest and most reliable mass base."

He has his own answer to the question of "Who am I?"

"Some people tend to lose their heads about who they really are after they are in power, have some money or fame," Liu said. "They can't put themselves in a right position in their relations with the people."

"In fact, however powerful or wealthy one person becomes, he should always be a student and a servant," he said.

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At his helm, the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee is devoted to building ideology, culture and theory, since publicity has always been an important part of the work for the CPC in governing China.

As deputy head of the Publicity and Ideological Work Leading Group of the CPC Central Committee, Liu mobilized more than 3,000 scholars and researchers in 2004 to work on an eight-year project on better adapting Marxism to China's real conditions. Some latest ideological research results were used in designing disciplinary layout of social sciences and compiling textbooks.

He encourages the Party and government departments to appropriately treat, use and manage media and create conditions for media to sniff out wrongdoing or corruption.

Minutes after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake rocked southwest China's Sichuan and neighboring Gansu and Shaanxi provinces on May 12, 2008, Liu asked the China Central Television to live broadcast the catastrophe without interruption to inform the nation of the relief work.

Seeing the timely reports, the Chinese people showed an outpouring of love and donated billions of yuan to help survivors from the quake that left 87,000 people dead or missing.

The Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee later reassured Chinese media to swiftly, accurately, openly and transparently report on major social events of public concern under the effective management and proper guidance of higher authorities.