Yuen Yuen Ang
Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University
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 post-1980s transformation 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 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. Beyond academia, Ang serves as a Trustee of the Trust Principles of journalistic integrity at Reuters, the world’s largest multimedia news provider.
Polytunity: 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.
AIM Paradigm: AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy) is Ang’s compass for navigating this moment of polytunity. AIM centers systems thinking, pluralistic pathways, and awareness of how power shapes ideas. AIM is not a static “framework,” but a paradigm that reorients underlying assumptions and values—generating a family of new questions, approaches, and findings, as mapped out in the AIM Glossary hosted on this website.
Origins & evolution: AIM formalizes the ideas and methods developed across Ang’s 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, and China’s state-led innovation drive.
Recognition: 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.” Her research applying AIM to adaptive policy communication, using LLMs (large language models), 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 a seven-episode video lecture series based on her books, which has attracted over a million views. Rather than “banning AI,” Ang proactively 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. One objective of Polytunity is to equip college students with an essential civic skill in the twenty-first century: interpreting global disruptions with agency and communicating this publicly (see Polytunity: The Gen-Z Series). 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, 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).
Impact & Resonance
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Margarita Cedeño, former Vice President of the Dominican Republic
“Yuen Yuen Ang proposes a bold and transformative concept called ‘polytunity’… It is an invitation to change the paradigm from which we interpret reality and design the future.”
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Theda Skocpol Scholar Prize (Comparative Politics)
“Ang’s scholarship evokes the spirit of Theda Skocpol’s contributions to political science. Like Skocpol, her work pushes us to rethink existing theories, concepts, and categories in comparative politics.”
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Viviana Zelizer Book Prize (Sociology)
"How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas... and should have a major impact across many social sciences."
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Stephen Dubner, Host of Freakonomics Radio
"One of the most powerful and fascinating pieces we’ve done in some time… If Yuen Yuen Ang really is, as she puts it, intellectually weird — well, she’s my kind of weird.”
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Ezra Klein, Podcast Host @ The New York Times
"Pioneering work on China’s political system... pretty profound implications. Or at least, it is an interesting way of thinking about how we are governed here [in America]."
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Peter Katzenstein Book Prize (Political Economy)
“Ang’s systematic engagement with diverse literatures circumvents disagreement over which came first, democracy or development, to make a field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes.”
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Listeners @ Freakonomics Radio
“I am perhaps a simple woman, but I recognize quality work and discussion when I see it or hear it.”
“It was so consuming I had to simply stop my car and sit there listening.”
“Probably the thing I appreciate the most is your willingness to step back, look at the paradigms and ask, can we do better?"
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Matt Lord, Senior Editor @ Boston Review
"I'm very grateful for the moral and analytical clarity you bring.” - On Ang’s essay Beyond Elite Innovation
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The Economist, Recommends 5 Books on Development
“The enduring drag of weak institutions on a country’s development might imply pessimism. Such thoughts can be dispelled by considering the example of China… Ang [How China Escaped the Poverty Trap] attributes China’s remarkable transformation to a ‘co-evolutionary’ process.”
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Douglas North Book Prize (Institutional Economics)
“Ang [China’s Gilded Age] develops provocative new theory to distinguish among different types of corruption… This outstanding book has already made substantial waves in academia and in policy circles.”
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Alice Amsden Book Award (Socio-Economics)
“In China’s Gilded Age, Yuen Yuen Ang’s eclectic intellectual and methodological approach also ensures the book’s appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience.”
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Kenyan Ambassador Martin Kimani
“Yuen Yuen Ang has a principle, a very simple principle of ‘use what you have,’ which offers a sharp challenge to the legacy of coloniality in development. It rejects the imposition of external models that fail to fit local realities, urging instead the strengthening of existing institutions, however flawed, through use and adaptation.” - Speech at BMZ-Konferenz in Germany, Coloniality & the Way Forward
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Efosa Ojomo, Christensen Institute
“I’m reminded of what Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist I deeply admire, says about development: ‘the first step in development is using what you have, not what you want…’ I think the sooner we begin to use what we have–however little–to get what we want, the sooner we can develop sustainably.”
