Chen Xi is an expert on geo-tech competition, smart city and ICT corporation strategy. He is the founder of Harbor Overseas, a global smart-city consulting company. He is the creator of Asia Smart City Ranking, G20 Smart City Ranking, Asia Smart City Quarterly Review. Dr Chen is an academic committee member at the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding of Peking University and an adjunct associate professor at Xi’an Jiaotong 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. He 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 2016-2019 and an advisor to the ZTE Strategy Committee. He was chief planner of smart city design in several keynote projects such as Beijing Sub-center and its transportation hub, Gwadar (Pakistan). He completed his PhD under a joint program between Dalian University of Technology and Cornell University, which was sponsored by the China Scholarship Council. He finished his post-doctoral research (Awarded Excellent) on the China-US geo-tech competition under a joint program between Peking University and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.