Zhang Xi is Secretary of the Youth League Committee at the China National Chemical Corporation (CNCC). He was born in Beijing, China, in 1974. He is a chemical engineer by training and received his master and doctoral degrees at Kanazawa University (Japan), where he was a Monbukagakusho Scholar. From 2006 to 2008, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota, where he studied bioinorganic chemistry and catalytic oxidation chemistry. Since 2008, he has been working for CNCC. He is proficient in English, Russian and Japanese.