Glossary
Peak China
Peak China is a media and policy meme that frames China as having passed the height of its rise and entered decline — a narrative Yuen Yuen Ang critiques as a one-sided, Western-centered misreading of China's actual, paradoxical trajectory.
China’s Economic Paradox
China's Economic Paradox refers to the coexistence of an impressive tech boom and a broad growth slowdown in Xi Jinping's China, revealing how collapse-or-dominance narratives misread China through Western self-perception.
Function of Policy Ambiguity
Function of Policy Ambiguity theorizes ambiguous policy communication as serving an adaptive function, giving agents room to interpret, experiment, and flexibly implement policies under complex conditions.
Using What You Have
Using What You Have is a development principle that means creatively repurposing existing resources, practices, and knowledge to kick-start change, even when these arrangements look weak or backward by first-world standards.
Industrial Policy Under Uncertainty
Industrial Policy Under Uncertainty argues that under genuine uncertainty — unknown possibilities, not calculable risk — industrial policy should shift from picking winners to discovering them.
Expert-Directed LLM Annotation
Expert-Directed LLM Annotation is a method that uses large language models to scale expert human classification rather than replacing it, combining codebooks, structured training, and fine-tuned LLMs to annotate large corpora reliably.
Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI)
Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI) is a cross-national measure of four types of corruption—petty theft, grand theft, speed money, and access money—based on Ang’s Unbundling Corruption typology.
Steroids of Capitalism
Steroids of Capitalism is a metaphor for access money: a form of corruption that can perversely stimulate commercial transactions while producing serious side effects.
Speed Money
Speed money is a type of corruption that involves paying petty bribes to regular bureaucrats to bypass red tape or harassment.
Unbundling Corruption
Unbundling Corruption is a typology that disaggregates corruption into four distinct types: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, and access money.
Western-Centric Thinking
Western-Centric Thinking is a mode of reasoning that treats Western capitalist democracy as the universal benchmark or endpoint of development.
Directed Improvisation with AI
Directed Improvisation with AI extends Ang’s model of Directed Improvisation to human–AI co-creation by redefining human agency—from humans producing answers on their own to directing how humans and AI produce them together.
Autocracy with Democratic Characteristics
Autocracy with Democratic Characteristics explains why China achieved growth without becoming a Western-style democracy: it substituted political reforms with bureaucratic reforms that injected “democratic characteristics” into an autocracy.
Adaptive Policy Communication
Adaptive Policy Communication is a theory that explains how leaders steer policy implementation by mixing clear and ambiguous directions to selectively enforce discipline and grant flexibility.
Access Money
Access money refers to high-stakes exchanges in which business actors offer substantial rewards to political elites in order to obtain exclusive, lucrative privileges, and not merely to bypass red tape (in contrast to speed money).
Variation, Selection & Niche Creation
Variation, Selection & Niche Creation are three adaptive mechanisms that govern how solutions are generated, how success is defined and rewarded, and how heterogeneity across units can be turned into a system advantage.
Meta-Institutions
Meta-Institutions are higher-order structures and strategies that enable adaptation, learning, and the discovery of solutions under uncertainty.
Enabling Adaptation
Enabling Adaptation is a research and policy agenda focused on creating the conditions that make effective adaptation possible, framing it as a series of design problems.
Complex vs. Complicated
Complex vs. Complicated is an ontological distinction between systems made up of interconnected elements that adapt to one another (complex—like trees), and mechanical objects composed of separate parts whose operations are linear and controllable (complicated—like toasters).
Complexity & Development
Ang proposes that the emerging agenda of Complexity and Development should move beyond prescribing adaptation as a panacea. She identifies a critical gap: explaining how to enable adaptation in the first place.