[1] Zhang was born in January 1963 and has ancestral roots in Bozhou, Anhui province.

Zhang is the founding Director of the China Center for Economic Studies (CCES),[2] a Shanghai-based Think-Tank for modern Chinese economy.

[3] In July 2015, he was one of the three economists selected for face-to-face dialogue with then Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing.

[5] Also in 2015, along with Justin Yifu Lin and Fan Gang, he was awarded the Prize of China Economics Innovation.

[6] Over the past 25 years he has authored or edited numerous books including Economic Transition with Chinese Characteristics: Thirty Years of Reform and Opening Up (McGill-Queen University Press, 2008),[7] Transformation of the Chinese Enterprises (Cengage Learning, 2009),[8] Unfinished Reforms of the Chinese Economy (World Scientific Publishing Ltd., 2013),[9] and End of Hyper Growth In China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).