ZhongXiang Zhang, a holder of Ph.D in economics from Wageningen University, The Netherlands in 1996 and majoring in energy and environmental economics, industrial economics, public finance, trade and environment, and macroeconomic modeling, is a Visiting Professor at the CNCC Thrust of the Society Hub, HKUST (GZ). He is an editor of Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and over the past 20+ years, he has served as the founding editorial board member of SSCI-indexed Climate Policy; Environmental Science and Policy; and International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. He is a Fellow of Asia and the Pacific Policy Society, Australia, and has been serving as China Representative of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) since 2013.

Professor Zhang authored and edited 22 books and special issues of international journals, authored over 200 publications in English, and is among the Top 20 authors from Chinese universities in all branches of social sciences based on the first-authored articles in key international journals over the 54 years. His paper is awarded with the Xue Muqiao Price Research Award (2022), China’s Ministry of Education’s Second Prize of Excellent Achievements in Scientific Research in Higher Education Institutions (Humanities and Social Sciences) (2024), and the First Price of the 15th Tianjin Outstanding Achievement Awards in Social Science, and is selected as the Top 20 papers ever published in Climate Policy over the past 20 years. He is consecutively ranked among the Top 4 most cited scholars inside China in the field of economics and finance, and based on 1960-2024 career-long impact, he is ranked among the World’s Top 1000 Scientists in the fields of both economics and energy rated by Stanford University. He served as an expert to many international organizations including UNCTAD, European Commission, North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation and ADB, delivered eight keynotes at the International Association for Energy Economics conferences, and made the original contributions to a number of long-term goals and strategies that China has implemented, including the carbon intensity target for 2020, capping carbon emissions around 2030, the establishment of the belt and road initiative, and the development of global carbon market. 

Professor Zhang began his career at the State Planning Commission (now National Development and Reform Commission) in the 1980s, and was on Faculty of Economics and Faculty of Law at University of Groningen in the Netherlands in the 1990s, a senior fellow at East-West Center (the Honolulu-based, public diplomacy think tank established and sponsored by the U.S. Congress) in the 2000s,  a “Fudan Distinguished Professor” and chairman at School of Economics, Fudan University, Shanghai, and the founding dean and a distinguished university professor at the Ma Yinchu School of Economics, Tianjin University before taking up his current position.