Liú Zhòu 劉晝 (Northern Qí, fl. c. 540–565), zì Kǒngzhāo 孔昭, of Bóhǎi Fùchéng 渤海阜城 (modern Hébei), is the conventional but contested attributed author of the Liúzǐ 劉子 (KR3j0013). His biography is in Bei shǐ 81 (Rúlín lièzhuàn 儒林列傳) and, more briefly, in Bei-Qí shū 44. He is described as orphaned and poor in his youth, an obsessive autodidact who read day and night without interruption (shūyè bùxī 晝夜不息), repeatedly failing the xiùcái 秀才 (Cultivated Talent) examination — which he attempted, by his biographer’s count, ten times in succession. Embittered by this failure, he composed a work titled Gāo cái bùyù zhuàn 高才不遇傳 (“Biographies of Talented Men who Did Not Meet their Time”). In the time of Northern Qí Emperor Xiàozhāo 孝昭帝 (r. 560–561) he travelled to the secondary capital at Jìnyáng 晉陽 and presented a memorial of blunt and direct counsel; this too was widely judged out of step with the realities of the court and was never accepted. He then collected the writings he had submitted into a volume titled Dì dào 帝道 (“The Way of an Emperor”), and during the Héqīng 河清 reign (562–565) composed the Jīnxiāng bìyán 金箱璧言 (“Jewel Words from the Gold-trimmed Casket”), an indictment of the Northern Qí governance — none of these works survives.
The Sìkù editors (in their tiyao to the Liúzǐ) note that Liú Zhòu’s biography itself does not mention a Liúzǐ under his name, and remark several inconsistencies between the biography (which describes his prose as “very ancient and clumsy” 言甚古拙 and which says he never went south of the Yangtze) and the surviving Liúzǐ (which is rhetorically “ornate, brilliant, trim and elegant” 縟麗輕蒨 and whose Táng commentator Yuán Xiàozhèng 袁孝政 in his preface said the author had “exiled himself south of the Yangtze and so wrote this book”). The Sìkù provisionally retains the LiúZhòu attribution as the most defensible (against the Táng catalogues’ Liú Xié 劉勰, against later proposals of Liú Xīn 劉歆 and Liú Xiàobiāo 劉孝標) but admits the question is finally undecidable. Modern scholarship (Lín Qíxián and Chén Fèngjīn 1985, 1998; Wáng Lìqì 1981) likewise treats the question as open while continuing to default to Liú Zhòu. CBDB does not record him under a separate id.