Zhang Weiwei () is a Chinese professor of international relations at Fudan University and the director of its China Institute. Zhang is also an Internet celebrity, spreading his political ideas through online video platforms such as Xigua Video, Bilibili, TikTok and YouTube.
Zhang is a strong defender of China's political and economic system. Therefore, he is favored by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Some of his political views, such as the "superiority of the China Model" and that the OBOR is a "major transformation unprecedented in five thousand years" have been criticized by scholars such as Xiang Lanxin for not being in line with historical facts.
Zhang is the youngest of six siblings in his family. During the Cultural Revolution (1966âÂÂ1976), his older siblings all went to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps while he stayed in Shanghai because of a policy. In 1975, at the age of 17, he was recruited into the No.2 Shanghai Carving Factory (ä¸Âæµ·éÂÂå»äºÂÃ¥ÂÂ) as a worker and jade carving apprentice.
Soon after, the college entrance examinations resumed with the end of the Cultural Revolution, and in 1977 Zhang was admitted to the foreign languages department of Fudan University, where he persuaded the dean to sit in on courses in international politics. From 1981 to 1983, Zhang was a postgraduate student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, studying translation.
In 1988, Zhang went to the University of Geneva-affiliated Graduate Institute of International Studies for a master's degree in international relations (1990) and then pursued a PhD, which he received in 1994.
From 1983 to 1988, Zhang was one of many English interpreters of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, worked for some Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, in the mid-1980s.
Zhang has written extensively in English and Chinese on People's Republic of China's economic and political reform, China's development model and comparative politics. Zhang is among the major proponents of a "Chinese model", which he defines as a blend of a planned economy with market mechanisms and a top-down governance structure complemented by some grassroots electoral participation.
He expanded on the concept of a civilization state with his book ' (2012).
Zhang is a Senior research fellow at the Chunqiu Institute, a think tank in Shanghai.
Zhang is the head of Fudan University's China Institute.
Previously, he was a professor at the unaccredited, for-profit Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations in Switzerland, a fact that the Chinese political scientist Xiang Lanxin mocked in an interview with the blog publication Reading the China Dream.
Since 2019, Zhang has been the host of "This is China" (è¿Âå°±æ¯ä¸Âå½), a lecture on the virtues of the Chinese government, launched by Dragon Television, a state-run TV channel.
Zhang's Bilibili channel has more than 1.28 million subscribers as of 2 March 2026.
The New York Times characterized Zhang as a propagandist-academic.
Zhang emphasizes what he sees as the unique features of China's political practices and culture. He encourages Chinese to develop "self-confidence" in these areas and to "no longer be subservient to the Western discourse." According to Zhang, Chinese should be more vocal in praising their country's system and its benefits tell China's story with pride in order to increase its discourse power.
Zhang preaches eradicating the influence of China's "Spiritual Americans," by which he refers to Chinese, particularly intellectual elites, who he deems as having been "infiltrated" in the 1980s by Western discourse, standards, and the Western sense of culture. According to Zhang:
Zhang describes the Western system as having its own merits and defects, "but its systemic defects now start to eat away its strengths". Zhang criticizes Western liberal democracy. He promotes the idea of Chinese socialist democracy, which he describes as a combination of "selective democracy" and electoral democracy. Zhang's view is that Chinese socialist democracy outperforms "Western procedural democracy" because the Western approach is insufficient to choose trustworthy leaders and the Chinese approach is more meritocratic. Zhang also points to China's long-term stability and economic growth as further evidence of what he believes is the superiority of its system.
Zhang believes that "good governance" should be the main standard for evaluating political systems rather than their normative underpinnings.
According to Zhang, the concept of political party in the Western context does not apply to the CCP. The CCP is a ruling group that follows Chinese political traditions and represents the interests of a nation as a whole.
On May 17, 2016, Zhang attended the National Symposium on the Work of Philosophy and Social Sciences chaired by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. On May 31, 2021, Zhang gave a lecture to the Politburo of the CCP on strengthening China's international propaganda.