Prof. Zhou Yuyuan is the deputy director of the Center for West Asian and African Studies, and senior fellow of the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS). His expertise covers African development and security, third world debt, foreign aid in Africa, and China-Africa cooperation. He is the author of two books, i.e., Is African Century Coming? African Ownership and China-African Cooperation (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2017) and From ASEAN to ASEAN Community: A Study on ASEAN Policy-Making (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2015). He is also the co-translator of An Introduction of African Politics (2015). His work achieves extensive publication and circulation in academic journals, newspapers, and policy briefings.

Prof. Zhou graduated from Jinan University (Guangzhou) with PhD in 2009 and Master degree in 2006. He completed the post-doctoral research at the School of International Studies of Peking University in 2013. He was a research fellow at the Institute for African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University from 2009-2013. He has been a visiting fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC in 2017. He has visited numbers of African countries in the past years.