Key Speakers

Professor Huang Jikun is Professor at the School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences and Director of the China Center for Agricultural Policy at Peking University. He received his BS degree from Nanjing Agricultural University in 1984 and PhD in agricultural economics from the University of the Philippines at Los Banos in 1990. His research covers a wide range of issues on China's agricultural and rural development, including work on agricultural R&D policy, water and land policy, agricultural price and trade, food demand and supply projection, and economics of climate change. He has published more than 470 journal papers, with including several papers published in Science and Nature. He is co-author of 19 books.

Professor Christine Wong is a leading authority on China's public finance. Her work on public finance, central-local relations and their implications for governance, economic development and welfare in China are widely cited, including several major World Bank studies for which Professor Wong was principal author. In addition to a distinguished academic career, Professor Wong has held senior staff positions in the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Over the past twenty years she has worked extensively with the World Bank, the OECD, the Asian Development Bank, as well the IMF, UNDP, UNICEF, and the UK Department for International Development. She is a member of the OECD Advisory Panel on Budgeting and Public Expenditures.

Associate Professor Qian Forrest Zhang has taught at Singapore Management University since 2005. He completed his undergraduate training at Fudan University in Shanghai in 1995 and obtained a PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2004. His research focuses on China’s agrarian political economy but extends to a wide range of other issues in contemporary China, including self-employment, stratification and inequality, social mobility, and family relations. His research has been published in scholarly journals such as The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Marriage and Family,World Development, Journal of Agrarian Change, Sociology, Geoforum, and Politics & Society.