When the old operating system fails, what new system should replace it?

AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is a new paradigm Yuen Yuen Ang advances for a disrupted, multipolar world. It replaces what Ang calls the industrial–colonial worldview that has long shaped political economy: its habit of treating societies as controllable machines, its tacit assumption that the West is the universal benchmark, and its pretense of neutrality even as power determines whose ideas count.

AIM begins with three generative assumptions.

• Adaptive: Societies are complex systems, not toasters—so complexity is not a nuisance to be simplified away, but a reality to be studied directly and creatively.

• Inclusive: The West is one path, not the endpoint—so development is not imitation, but “using what you have,” the creative repurposing of indigenous capabilities and knowledge.

• Moral: Objectivity requires confronting power, not denying it—because power is most entrenched when it hides behind claims of neutrality.

If you know Ang primarily as a “China specialist,” AIM may look like a departure. But it isn’t. AIM did not emerge in 2024. Its core ideas and applications were already present—often in plain sight—in Ang’s earlier books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020). What changed is not the substance of the work, but the naming. For years, the moment “China” appeared on a cover, many readers automatically filed its content under “Chinese exceptionalism,” not portable concepts or theory. That reflex is not an accident; it is structural erasure.

In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Ang reframed development as a coevolutionary rather than linear process. It also seeded a garden of new concepts, for example, directed improvisation (direction from the top paired with improvisation from below), meta-institutions (higher-order designs that enable adaptive problem-solving), adaptive policy communication, and more. That book centered adaptation, learning, and unorthodox solutions deviating from Western norms in the political economy of development. It demonstrated the principles of AIM without calling them that.

In China’s Gilded Age, she advanced a multidimensional theory of corruption and introduced new concepts such as “access money,” challenging moral double standards and exposing parallels between China and the West that conventional theories and metrics obscure.

In short, AIM is the formal expression of what was always there in Ang’s work: a way of doing political economy that takes complexity seriously, restores plural pathways, and makes power visible.

Learn more below through Ang’s writing, speaking, teaching, and programs, where she develops AIM as a paradigm and applies it across a range of domains and research collaborations.