Zhang Hao, male, born in March 1986, member of the Communist Party of China, doctor of economics, was promoted to researcher in June 2023. He is currently the deputy director of the editorial department of Finance and Trade Economics, Academy of Financial and Economic Strategy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is mainly engaged in research work in the fields of market circulation and resident consumption. He has published 1 personal monograph and more than 30 articles in important journals and newspapers such as Economic Research, World Economy, Finance and Trade Economics, and People's Daily. He has presided over 2 projects of the National Social Science Foundation. He has won the second prize of the "Excellent Countermeasure Information Award" of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2020), the first prize of the "Outstanding Paper in Young Economics" of the Economics Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2020), and the second prize of the "Business Development Research Achievement Award" of the Ministry of Commerce (2021).
Tell us a little bit about your academic experience. What was your consideration for choosing to pursue a research career at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences?
In 2004, I entered the Business School of Chinese University to study trade economics, and obtained bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees. During his doctoral studies, he was sponsored by the China Scholarship Council and went to Kobe University in Japan to participate in a joint training program for one year. After graduating with a Ph.D. in 2013, he joined the Institute of Financial and Economic Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
At that time, I chose to work in our hospital mainly because of two considerations. First, professional counterparts. The Institute of Financial Strategy (formerly known as the Institute of Finance and Trade Economics) is a recognized heavyweight research institution in the field of trade and economics. Second, the content of the work is diverse. Our institute is an academic think tank, which not only carries out academic research, but also conducts down-to-earth countermeasure research. During my time at the school, I actively participated in research projects while learning theoretical knowledge, and after completing the identity change, I was able to better give back to the society with what I had learned. For these reasons, I choose the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as my first choice for job hunting.
What changes have you received from your colleagues, academic colleagues, especially young scholars? Please briefly comment on the policy of exceptionally changing professional titles.
In the past few years, although I have heard about the promotion of professional titles, I feel that I am far away from myself. This time, I applied for an exceptional promotion to the title, and I also held the idea and mentality of "giving it a try". It wasn't until the end of the judging that I gradually reacted. During this time, I am constantly adjusting my work rhythm, seizing the time to make up for my shortcomings in the areas I am lacking, continuing to work hard in the areas I am good at, and striving to refine and deepen the content I was familiar with.
On the one hand, the system of exceptional promotion of professional titles has shortened the promotion period and broken the stereotype that "seniority" is necessary to evaluate professional titles in such a large scientific research institution; on the other hand, it has better solved the problem of young people needing to "wait for years" and improved the enthusiasm of the institute to encourage young scientific research personnel to make exceptional declarations, which is a good attempt to innovate the system and mechanism of personnel training and has played a very good role.
In related academic fields, what issues have you focused on in your research, what innovative achievements have you made, and what academic achievements or awards have you achieved?
My main area of research is commodity circulation. Perhaps unlike my colleagues with multidisciplinary backgrounds, I have been studying in this professional field since I was a student, and my research direction is more from commodity circulation to the outward expansion, that is, to use circulation as a perspective to combine with key hot issues to form perspectives and ideas for analyzing research problems.
There are two main research questions that I am currently focusing on. The first is the construction of a unified national market. It's actually an old topic. I began to pay attention to this issue when I was studying for my PhD, and my research at that time was more about the causes of local government behavior. From the perspective of circulation, one of the basic characteristics of the unified market is that commodity elements can flow freely across regions, so from this perspective, we can study the principle of market segmentation and the factors that hinder the construction of a unified market. I have successively published papers in Finance and Trade Economics and World Economy, such as "Re-Discussion on Whether the Domestic Regional Market Tends to Divide or Integrate: Discussion and Improvement of Measurement Methods" and "Measurement of Inter-regional Production Division and Market Unification: Re-discussion of the Price Method", which won the first prize of "Outstanding Paper in Young Economics" of the Department of Economics of our school and the Excellence Award of the "Business Development Achievement Award" of the Ministry of Commerce.
The second is the business behavior of enterprises in the online market. This is a hot issue, involving many fields such as industrial organization theory and micro-optimal behavior decision-making. From the perspective of circulation, the online market has the function of connecting production and consumption, and to analyze the behavior of e-commerce platforms or settled enterprises, it is inseparable from the portrayal of real consumer purchase behavior. In this regard, I used the e-commerce data I collected to carry out research, and successively published papers such as "Micro Price Behavior and Competition Effect in "E-commerce Festival", "Why Online Prices Frequently and Sharply Fluctuate: Strategic Pricing to Guide Purchasing Behavior", "E-commerce Dynamic Pricing Strategy under Asymmetric Competition" and other journals in journals such as "Finance and Trade Economics", "World Economy" and "Economic Research", and won the "Business Development Achievement Award" Excellence Award in the paper category.
In recent years, household consumption has attracted more and more attention. Focusing on this theme, I have written some research reports under the guidance of my leaders and colleagues based on my own research and observations, and have won the Excellent Countermeasure Information Award of the Institute many times.
Compared with universities and other research institutions, what do you think is special about this platform of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and what kind of support and assistance has the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences provided you with in terms of academic platform, development opportunities, policy incentives, software and hardware support, etc.
Comparatively speaking, the research characteristics of our institute are more prominent, and the teaching tasks of university teachers may be relatively heavier. Of course, teaching and research go hand in hand. In recent years, our institute has promoted the integration of science and education, and some well-known universities have also begun to establish think tanks, but in general, there will still be some focus. In addition, most of the think tank research of our institute comes directly from the major theoretical and practical issues of the party and the state. Compared with the research institutes affiliated to national ministries and commissions, the special feature of our institute is that it attaches great importance to academic inheritance, not only countermeasure research, but also very much theoretical research on standardized systems. Only on the basis of solid theoretical research can we give better play to the function of think tanks.
When I was growing up, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences gave me all-round support. First, you can get in touch with senior scholars more closely and understand their academic ideas and analytical ideas, which will directly inspire you to find topics and innovative ideas. Second, it provides abundant development opportunities, including local grassroots temporary training, international academic exchanges and seminars, in-depth interviews and research with local and enterprises, and direct participation in research tasks assigned by national ministries and commissions. Third, it provides effective incentives and strong guarantee conditions, including various academic awards for young scientific researchers, and youth start-up projects set up by institutes.
What's next in your academic research plan, and what are your thoughts on how to stay sharp about finding problems in long-term follow-up research, and how to further promote scientific innovation?
My current plan is two-fold. The first is to further strengthen the theoretical basis of economic research. In the past, there was a lot of empirical analysis that focused on specific phenomena, and it is necessary to continue to consolidate the theoretical foundation in the future. The second is to improve the ability to research countermeasures. On the basis of discovering and analyzing problems, we should gradually try to come up with ideas to solve problems, and the problems involved behind this may be more and more complex, so it will be more challenging.
Long-term follow-up studies actually help drive research on new issues. It is necessary to find an entry point, and then deepen and expand as you go, and gradually accumulate. When you are really familiar with the content in this field, it may be easier to find the "resonance point" when you develop new questions. A sentence spoken by the interviewee or a description in the written materials may be able to remind oneself of the problems encountered, thought and thought about in the past, and link them with the methodological logic and ideological views that they are relatively familiar with, so as to find commonalities and differences, so as to promote the study of new problems on the basis of previous accumulation.
What do you think young scholars should do well in academic research? What are your opinions and suggestions for other young scholars who plan to apply for exceptional promotion?
As for how young scholars can do academic research well, my personal experience is as follows: First, we should find the research direction or subject area that we are interested in, and constantly accumulate materials, read literature, and observe and think. Second, we must arrange the limited time, find the right rhythm, and balance between different work contents and between work and life. Third, we must have a relatively peaceful mind, and in the face of many challenges and even setbacks in the process of scientific research, the key is to make ourselves stronger. Now everyone says "involution", but in fact, "involution" means repeating at a lower level without achieving a breakthrough. At present, we are in an era of explosive growth of knowledge and information, rapid development of methods and technologies, and academic research is also "if you do not advance, you will retreat" or even "if you advance less, you will retreat". Therefore, as young scholars, especially those who want to apply for exceptional promotion, they should not focus their time and energy on low-level repetition, but should find the direction and perspective of research, possess unique data, materials and materials as much as possible, and do some forward-looking work to promote academic research. To do academic research, we should "sail against the current, and if we don't advance, we will 'push'".
Zhang Hao's main representative works
1. "Dynamic Pricing Strategy of E-commerce under Asymmetric Competition" (paper), Economic Research Journal, No. 2, 2023.
2. "Why Online Prices Fluctuate Frequently and Sharply: Strategic Pricing to Guide Buying Behavior" (paper), World Economy, No. 3, 2022.
3. Micro Price Behavior and Competition Effect in "E-commerce Festival" (paper), Finance and Trade Economics, No. 11, 2018.
4. "Measurement of Inter-regional Production Division of Labor and Market Unification: Re-discussion of the "Price Method" (paper), World Economy, No. 4, 2020.
5. Expansion of Household Consumption and the Formation of a Unified Market: The Domestic Situation of the "Local Market Effect" (Paper), Finance and Trade Economics, No. 6, 2020.
6. "Distance, Boundary and the Dynamic Performance of the Law of One Price" (paper), Finance and Trade Economics, No. 7, 2016.
7. Re-discussion of whether the domestic regional market tends to be segmented or integrated: Discussion and improvement of measurement methods (paper), Finance and Trade Economics, No. 11, 2014.
8. How to Undertake the Export Adjustment of Manufacturing Industry in the Domestic Market: The Significance of Matching Production and Demand and Domestic Trade (Paper), China Industrial Economics, No. 8, 2014.
9. "The Causes and Governance of the Chaos of Rural Subsistence Security Evaluation" (paper), China Rural Observation, No. 1, 2017.
10. Comprehensive Coordination and Coordination Mechanism of Competition, Industry and Trade Policies under the New Situation (monograph), China Business Press, 2019.