Zhang Junhua is currently Professor of Political Science at the School of International and Public Affairs at Jiaotong University, where is also Director of International Master’s Degree Program and Executive Director of the Centre for Contemporary Sino-Israel Studies. He has also been Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor at Hebrew University. In addition, he is Senior Associate at the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) in Brussels. Apart from his long-term academic career at the Free University Berlin and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, he has also been visiting professor at several universities around the world, including the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the University of Moscow, and the Institut Européen des Hautes Etudes Internationales. His research includes Chinese politics, international security, international political economy, and social memory, and his most recent book is Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe (2012). Zhang holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the J.W.Goethe-University in Germany.
Through a case study of China’s high speed rail system, tonight’s talk will discuss an emerging “neo-statist” development model to which insufficient attention has been paid thus far. Political elites in China have since 2000 adhered to this performance-oriented development model, and “secondary innovation” in the Chinese economy has been a feature of emerging neo-statism.
