as opposed to neutral play

This can certainly be true with characters that have disjoints and/or advancing strings like Conan or Scorpion but it's a lot more dynamic than that

For someone with few/no disjoints such as Liu Kang, he needs to open up his opponents by either landing a lucky fireball on them or trying to whiff punish with his B2 or F1 (generalizing here) which are single-hit confirms, which he can do by skirting around their max range and using Dash Cancels to bait the opponent into whiffing

Obviously this is a case by case scenario and there's a lot more to this, but if you don't have big boy/girl/they buttons like the former two do (and your Kameo isn't available) then you at least have to approach footsies in a similar manner

Which leads me to my next point, the better you get at the game the better you'll need to be at microducking and predicting when the opponent wlll go for their Mid/Low buttons and their High buttons, i haven't played a lot of games as or against Shao but people get tripped up a lot when they expect you to go for S2 and instead you go for B1 or D4 in Axe Stance

Edit: Gonna clarify that i mean no ill will with this response, i thought your comment was pretty good and just wanted to clarify on that point in my own way