About

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies governance under complexity and how societies adapt or fail to adapt to disruptions such as China’s transformation, multipolarity, and artificial intelligence. Her work centers on understanding societal adaptation beginning with China’s capitalist revolution and extending to global challenges. Ang holds the first named chair at the Center for Economy and Society, a multidisciplinary program aimed at finding alternatives to traditional economic thinking, and is also a faculty member at the SNF Agora Institute, which is dedicated to strengthening global democracy. Beyond academia, she serves as a Trustee of the Trust Principles of journalistic integrity at Reuters, the world’s largest multimedia news provider. Ang introduces the concept of "polytunity," reframing the current global "polycrisis" as a unique opportunity for deep transformation of global institutions and thought. She developed the AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy) paradigm, which centers on complex systems, pluralistic pathways, and power awareness, reorienting assumptions and values to generate new questions, methods, and solutions. This paradigm formalizes ideas developed across her scholarship, especially in her award-winning books "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (2016) and "China’s Gilded Age" (2020), and extends to interpreting the emerging world order, human-AI co-creation, and China’s state-led innovation drive. Ang’s cross-disciplinary research has received numerous awards across political science, sociology, and economics, including the inaugural Theda Skocpol Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association for impactful empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions. An award-winning teacher, she emphasizes teaching students how to think critically, with recent courses including China and the World, From Polycrisis to Polytunity, and Directed Improvisation with AI. She actively bridges scholarship and policymaking, directing The Polytunity Project and The Multipolar World & U.S.–China Forum at Johns Hopkins, and has been named among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical for her research’s potential to influence government direction. Known for translating complex debates into accessible insights, Ang has been featured in global media and writes for premier outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, and The New York Times.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Development economics
• Law
• Economy
• Political economy
• Market economy
• Finance
• Medicine
• Virology
• Business

Selected publications

• Autocracy with Chinese Characteristics: Beijing's Behind-the-Scenes Reforms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01 · 45 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | Paradigm 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <div> <span>YYA Glossary | </span><span>Market-Building vs. Market-Preserving</span></div>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Demystifying China's Belt and Road: The Struggle to Define China's Project of the Century

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | Coevolutionary Development: China as Demonstration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | Adaptive Fiscal Capacity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Did Development Actually Happen? | How China Escaped the Poverty Trap [2016]

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | Directed Improvisation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | <span>Polycrisis</span>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YYA Glossary | Directed Improvisation: China as Demonstration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nan Jia

  7 shared

• Kenneth Guang-Lih Huang

  National University of Singapore

  4 shared

• Qian Wang

  2 shared

• Bo Yang

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

• Nan Jia

  Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  1 shared

• Bo Yang

  1 shared

• Kevin Zheng Zhou

  University of Hong Kong

  1 shared

• Yanbo Wang

  Beijing Technology and Business University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Named among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Go…