Chen Xi

Chen Xi is an expert on geo-tech competition, smart city and ICT corporation strategy. He is the founder and CEO of Harbor Overseas, a global smart-city consulting company. He is the creator of the Asia Smart City Ranking and editor of the Asia Smart City Quarterly Review. Dr Chen is an adjunct associate professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University and an academic committee member at the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding of Peking University. He served as the president of Institute of Smart City Planning and Design of Beijing Municipality, having assisted the Beijing Municipal Government in shaping smart-city policy, regulation and evaluation systems. Chen was a visiting senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore in 2019. He served as president of the Institute of Smart City Research at the ZTE Corporation from 2016-2019 and as an advisor to the ZTE strategy committee. He was chief planner for smart-city design for several key projects such as the Beijing Sub-Center and its transportation hub, Gwadar (Pakistan) and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway. He completed his PhD in a joint program between Dalian University of Technology and Cornell University under the sponsorship of the China Scholarship Council. He finished his post-doctoral research on the China-US geo-tech competition in a joint program between Peking University and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.