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. A central theme in Ang’s work is how societies adapt, or fail to adapt, to disruptions—beginning in the context of China’s capitalist revolution and extending to multipolarity and artificial intelligence.

Appointments: Ang is the first named chair at the Center for Economy and Society, a multidisciplinary program established to find alternatives to traditional economic thinking. Her professorship is named after Alfred Chandler, the American economic historian who pioneered the study of corporate capitalism. She is also a faculty member at the SNF Agora Institute, dedicated to strengthening global democracy. Beyond academia, Ang serves as a Trustee of the Trust Principles of journalistic integrity at Reuters, the world’s largest multimedia news provider. In June 2026, she was named Wilmar Visiting Professor of Geoeconomics and Global Transformation at the National University of Singapore.

Polytunity & AIM: Ang argues that societies fail to adapt when their inherited assumptions and paradigms no longer fit new realities. Where many elites lament today’s disruptions as a paralyzing “polycrisis.” Ang reframes them as polytunity: breakdown can open rare space for renewal. Her response is AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy—a system of thinking that centers complex systems (adaptive), pluralistic paths of development (inclusive), and awareness of how power shapes knowledge (moral). AIM formalizes ideas developed across Ang’s scholarship, especially her award-winning books How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), and now informs her work on the emerging world order, human-AI co-creation, and China’s state-led innovation drive.

Recognition: Ang’s cross-disciplinary research has received awards across political science, sociology, and economics, with prize committees recognizing her work as “game-changing” and “field-shifting.” She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions.” Her research applying AIM to adaptive policy communication, using the method of human-directed LLM-annotation (large language model), is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Teaching: An award-winning teacher, Ang teaches students how to think—and not simply what to think. Her recent courses include China and the World, From Polycrisis to Polytunity, and Directed Improvisation with AI. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) produced an online video lecture series based on her work, which has attracted over a million views. Rather than “banning AI,” Ang actively trains students to direct and co-create with AI in their work.

Public impact: Bridging scholarship and 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 Multipolar Forum convenes experts across sectors in Washington, D.C. to explore U.S.–China relations in a tech-disrupted, multipolar era.

Media: 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, and The Ezra Klein Show. She writes for premier outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Pengpai (China), Project Syndicate, and The New York Times.

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