Yuen Yuen Ang

Ang studies governance under complexity and how societies adapt, or fail to adapt, to disruptions—whether from China’s transformation, multipolarity, or artificial intelligence.

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. The first named chair at the Center for Economy and Society, a multidisciplinary program established to find alternatives to traditional economic thinking, Ang’s professorship is named after American economic historian Alfred Chandler, who pioneered the study of business history and corporate capitalism. She is also a faculty member at the SNF Agora Institute, dedicated to strengthening global democracy.

Countering the fear-driven narrative of “polycrisis,” Ang advances polytunity, reframing the current moment of global disruption not as paralysis, but as a once-in-a-generation opening for deep transformation of global institutions and thought. She advances AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy—as a compass for navigating the polytunity. AIM is a paradigm that centers complex systems, pluralistic pathways beyond Western benchmarks, and awareness of how power shapes ideas. Unlike a static “framework,” AIM reorients assumptions and values, thus generating new questions, new approaches, and new findings.

AIM formalizes the ideas and methods developed across her scholarship, especially her award-winning books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020). Her recent work extends AIM to interpret the emerging world order, human-AI co-creation, policy signals, and China’s state-led innovation drive. On this website, Ang hosts a glossary on AIM that maps her “intellectual forest.”

Ang’s cross-disciplinary research has received awards across political science, sociology, and economics. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions.” Prize committees recognize her work as “game-changing” and “field-shifting.” She was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship on the most pressing issues of our times.” Her research applying AIM to study adaptive policy communication, using LLMs (large language models), is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

An award-winning teacher, Ang teaches students how to think, and not simply what to think. Her courses include China’s Great Transformation, China and the World, From Polycrisis to Polytunity, and Directed Improvisation with AI. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) produced a seven-episode video lecture series based on her books, which has attracted over a million views.

Bridging rigorous scholarship with policymaking, Ang has been named among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical for “research with potential to steer the direction of government.” At Johns Hopkins, Ang directs The Polytunity Project and The Multipolar World & U.S.–China Forum. The forum convenes experts across sectors in Washington, D.C. to explore U.S.–China relations in a tech-disrupted, multipolar era. She also serves as a Trustee of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, overseeing the Trust Principles of journalistic integrity at Reuters.

Known for translating complex debates into accessible insights for global audiences, Ang has been profiled by media across Asia, Europe, and North America, including CGTN Visionaries, Die Zeit, Freakonomics Radio, South China Morning Post, The Ezra Klein Show. She writes for premier outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Pengpai (China), Project Syndicate, and The New York Times.

Ang is a Senior Fellow at the Asia Global Institute at University of Hong Kong, the Development Leadership Dialogue at SOAS University of London, and a Distinguished Guest Lecturer at Schwarzman College.

For updates, follow her on LinkedIn or Polytunity (Substack).