What does it mean to advance new paradigms for a disrupted, multipolar world? Paradigm is a big word, often used casually. What does it actually mean?

Paradigm names something fundamental: the deep assumptions that shape how societies understand problems, imagine solutions, and decide what counts as progress.

A paradigm is not a buzzword, a toolkit, or a framework. It is analogous to an operating system. Change the operating system, and everything built on top of it must change as well.

Learning, Unlearning, Relearning

For me, changing paradigms did not begin as grand ambition. It began as a practical problem.

I received my doctoral training at Stanford University, steeped in rational choice theories and institutional economics, taught by world-renowned social scientists and generous mentors. Within that tradition, I wrote a PhD dissertation that led to a tenure-track faculty position, first at Columbia University and later on at the University of Michigan, where my mentor’s mentor Michel Oksenberg (China advisor to President Jimmy Carter) founded a hub for the study of Chinese politics. It was a clear and promising path.

But as I tried to turn my dissertation into my first book, I got stuck. My arguments were aligned with convention and appeared elegant, but they could not account for the dynamic reality of socio-economic transformation, where everything and everywhere was changing all at once. I was also uncomfortable with an unspoken assumption that China could only be explained as “exceptionalism”—a deviation from the Western norm of good institutions leading to economic success.

So, I decided to abandon my dissertation entirely and start again. Well-meaning colleagues warned me that this was “too risky.”

But my motivation was simple: I could not write a book that I no longer believed in. The problem did not lie with the case, but with the paradigm, the norm of social science analyses that I was expected to follow and replicate.

That decision eventually led to my first book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, published by Cornell University Press in 2016, under the legendary editorship of Roger Haydon and Peter Katzenstein.

The book’s preface quotes Pablo Picasso: Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

This year, 2026, marks the 10th anniversary of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. When it was first released, the book was ignored, derided, or appropriated. Over time, the arc slowly turned—thanks to numerous colleagues, editors, and readers who supported the book. While I am the book’s author, the direction it took evolved through many individuals’ reactions and interaction, often behind the scenes. The principles I explored in that book, including emergence and uncertainty, came alive.

That first book spawned multiple branches of my subsequent work, including my second book, China’s Gilded Age (2020), and other historical-comparative projects that may seem wholly unrelated. In fact, they all come from the same source: they challenged the mechanical, Western-centric assumptions of political economy—and attempted to deliver something different.

When the Old Operating System Fails

It took me twenty years to arrive at a broad characterization of what I had felt but struggled to name. For much of the modern era, political economy has been guided by what I now call an industrial-colonial paradigm. This paradigm treats societies as crude machines like toasters, devices that can easily be controlled by pressing the right button, producing the same results everywhere.

That is coupled with another assumption: Western capitalist democracies represent a universal benchmark of success. Development, in this view, is measured by how closely others “catch up” to that model. Difference becomes deviation; local knowledge becomes noise.

From a historical point of view, it is no surprise that mechanical and Western-centric thinking went hand-in-hand. We, modern humans, are inescapably shaped by the twin forces of capitalist industrialization and Western imperialism. To be sure, modernization has liberated humanity from certain material and social limitations of pre-modern life, but it also entrenched structural inequalities and reductionist habits of thought that underpin today’s intersecting problems—the polycrisis.

For a time, roughly eighty years from 1945, this dual operating system not only appeared to work; it was held up as scientific rigor. But as disruptions multiply—economic shocks, climate stress, technological upheaval, geopolitical fragmentation—its limits have become harder to ignore.

In reality, the world was never like a toaster; there is no button (root cause) to press. And the West no longer rules it with superior confidence; its own democracy and economy are struggling.

While we now live in a disrupted, hyper-complex, multipolar world, our default paradigm was designed for and during a bygone era. The instinctive responses are to advocate for “controlling risks” or making a 180-degree pivot from neoliberalism to industrial policies (variously packaged as “abundance” or “entrepreneurial states”).

But these do not address the fundamental mismatch between our new reality and how we’ve long been programmed to think.

Polytunity: Naming the Current Moment

In 2024, I introduced the term polytunity to reframe the present moment. Whereas popular discourse frames polycrisis as a source of fear and paralysis, polytunity sees disruption as a once-in-a-generation opening for deep, systemic transformation.

Polytunity does not deny crisis; it only refuses to be governed by fear. It also refuses to validate the Eurocentric agenda of polycrisis masquerading as global. If we do not reject false globalism in 2026, when will we do so?

Framing breakdown as polytunity clears the space for rethinking global institutions and thought. This diagnosis reflects my positionality on the margins of the establishment: privileged to work within elite institutions, yet positioned at their edges as a minority woman who studies China. Close enough to see the establishment from within, but far enough to recognize its blind spots.

For me, polytunity is no empty slogan. It names what I have been practicing it for two decades on a smaller scale: dismantling inherited models in order to create something I could stand behind.

AIM Political Economy: A New Paradigm

If the industrial-colonial paradigm is longer fit for the times, then what should replace it? My proposal is AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy.

AIM begins by redefining assumptions. Analytically, it treats political economies as complex adaptive systems rather than mechanical objects (Adaptive). Normatively, it challenges the idea that there is a single, Western standard by which all societies should be judged (Inclusive). Morally, it insists on confronting how power shapes whose voice counts and whose are erased (Moral).

AIM is not a sudden pivot. It is the formalization of an “operating system” I have been applying for years across topics: from economic-political modernization, US-China relations, the China model, to the non-democratic origins of Western fiscal capacity.

From Machines to Forests

A helpful way to understand AIM is through a shift in imagery. The industrial-colonial paradigm sees societies as machines and prizes homogeneity. AIM sees them as forests, with diversity as an indispensable source of resilience.

Forests cannot be engineered by blueprint. They grow, adapt, regenerate, and sometimes wither. Caring for them requires contextual knowledge, humility, and constant learning. Stewards of a forest do not command and control; they understand and tend to the conditions under which life can thrive. Their relationship is equal and respectful, not extractive.

This shift—from machine to forest—captures the heart of AIM.

A Living Forest of Ideas

From AIM has grown a forest of ideas, with one tree branching out to another. For example, China’s Gilded Age grew out of an observation on page 42 of my first book: about the structural evolution of corruption from speed to “access money.” To compare corruption structures across country, I had to collect my own data because existing metrics are one-dimensional. This became the Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI), featured in my interview with Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics Radio. To expand and refine the UCI prototype, I carried a second survey, and so on.

On the Glossary of this website, I trace the genealogy of the system of concepts, theories, measures that I’ve cultivated over the course of my career.

China serves as a crucial empirical foundation where many of my ideas were first demonstrated, but AIM is not bounded by one country. It is open to extension, application, and reinterpretation across regions and sectors. The assumption that theories demonstrated in China—such as directed improvisation—could not be generalized, whereas those derived from 17th century England travel universally to contexts like contemporary Nigeria reveals a double standard that can only be described as absurd. What’s more tragic than this absurdity is packaging it as social scientific rigor.

This website maps the forest of AIM. The Glossary defines each idea precisely. Other pages introduce my books and teaching, or list my publications for easy access. This page offers orientation from 10,000 feet: how my journey began, why certain assumptions had to be unlearned and redefined, and how the flora of AIM grew out of common soil and roots.

Why Paradigms Matter

Most debates offer answers based on existing assumptions. Paradigms determine, first and foremost, which questions get asked.

By reframing disruption as polytunity and advancing AIM, I invite you to reconsider how we can rethink and even reshape the post-2025 world order. When old operating systems no longer fit a disrupted reality, change is no longer an ambition, but a necessity.

Yuen Yuen Ang

Washington, D.C.