Renliang NIU received his PhD in Economics from CASS. Since 1999, he has worked in Shanxi Province and successively served as Deputy Secretary-General and Director of the Policy Research Office of the Provincial Party Committee, Director of Shanxi Development Planning Committee, Vice Governor of Shanxi Province and Deputy Director of the Standing Committee of Shanxi Provincial People's Congress. During his tenure, NIU presided over the drafting of "10^th Five-Year Plan", "11^th Five-Year Plan" and "12^th Five-Year Plan" of Shanxi Province. Among them, in 2000, the "10^th Five-Year Plan" of Shanxi Province, which was personally studied and drafted by him, first systematically proposed and deployed a comprehensive adjustment of Shanxi's industrial structure, which was highly valued by the state and he was invited to introduce experience at the national development planning system meeting as the sole typical example.

In 2002-2017, NIU served as Vice Governor of Shanxi Province and Deputy Director of the Standing Committee of Shanxi Provincial People's Congress. His main research areas were social security, capital market, industrial structure and ecological environment protection, and his research results won the "Xue Muqiao Price Research Award" and the "8^th China Book Award" twice, and many suggestions were adopted by the State Council. His works: Coke Price Research won the "5^th Xue muqiao Price Research Award", Enterprise Redundancy and Enterprise Efficiency won the "8^th China Book Award" and Resource-based Economic Transformation Research won the "First Prize of technological advancement of Shanxi 2012".

On January 27^th, 2019, NIU was elected as President of China Association of Productivity Science at its annual meeting. Founded in the early 1980s, China Association of Productivity Science mainly studies the components, combination forms, correlation structures and movement rules of social productivity in the national economic management system, education system, science and technology system and information system. While conducting comprehensive research on enterprise productivity, industrial productivity, regional productivity, social productivity and world productivity, it complies with the trend of the times of the Western Development and WTO and focuses on the theme of innovation and sustainable development.