AIM

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016): My book rejected the mechanical worldview and instead applied a complex systems lens to development. I expose three major schools for their theoretical dead ends (growth first, good institutions first, good histories first), then introduced my theory: development as a three-step, coevolutionary - not linear - process, marked by a recursive feedback loop (Adaptive). My analysis shows that growth-supporting institutions rarely follow Western templates; in reality, market-building institutions looked and functioned differently from market-preserving ones. This is true not only in China’s experience, but also in actual Western histories, not the partial “fairy tales” taught in textbooks (Inclusive). The book also shined a light on double standards, asking why educated society readily assumes the generalizability of American and European accounts, while insisting that those centered on China “can’t travel” beyond its borders (Moral).

China’s Gilded Age (2020): Growing directly out of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, this second book applies AIM to decolonize corruption studies. It challenges the popular belief that corruption afflicts only poor countries, whereas rich and mostly Western societies are clean and marked by “good governance,” an impression reinforced by global corruption metrics. Unbundling corruption into four distinct types - and spotlighting “access money” (a variety that can be found in wealthy democracies) - I chronicle the evolving quality of corruption over time, revealing that corruption can persist even in rich countries as legalized access money (Adaptive). Challenging the assumption of “Chinese exceptionalism,” I show that the Chinese pairing of corruption and growth is not an abnormality, but remarkably similar to America’s Gilded Age in the 19th century (Inclusive). In these ways, China’s Gilded Age exposes the normative biases that are built into global metrics and narratives, correcting them with more rigorous alternatives (Moral).