Yuen Yuen Ang’s work advances 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 theory, or a checklist. It is analogous to an operating system. Change the operating system, and everything built on top of it must change as well.

When Old Operating Systems Fail

For much of the modern era, political economy has been guided by an industrial-colonial paradigm. This paradigm treats societies as crude machines like toasters—devices that can easily be controlled by pressing the right buttons, producing the same results everywhere.

Embedded in this way of thinking is another assumption: that 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.

For a time, this operating system appeared to work. But as disruptions multiply—economic shocks, climate stress, technological upheaval, geopolitical fragmentation—the limits of that mindset have become harder to ignore. The world was never like a toaster. And the West no longer confidently rules it.

Polytunity: Naming the Current Moment

Ang introduces polytunity to reframe the present moment. Whereas popular discourse frames overlapping crises as paralysis or doom—polycrisis—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. Framing breakdown as polytunity clears the space for rethinking global institutions and thought. This diagnosis reflects Ang’s unique positionality on the margins of the establishment: privileged to work within elite institutions, yet positioned at their margins as a minority woman who studies China. Close enough to see the establishment from within, but far enough to recognize its blind spots.

AIM Political Economy: A New Paradigm

Ang’s proposal for a new paradigm is AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy.

AIM begins by redefining assumptions rather than prescribing solutions. Analytically, it treats political economies as complex, adaptive systems rather than controllable machines (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 a paradigm that reshapes the questions we ask, the methods we use, the answers we get, and the solutions we consider possible. It shifts our attention from control to adaptation and learning, from singular Western benchmarks to diverse development pathways, and from feigned neutrality to reflexivity.

From Machines to Forests

A helpful way to understand Ang’s work is through a shift in imagery. The industrial-colonial paradigm sees societies as machines. AIM sees them as forests.

Forests cannot be engineered by blueprint. They grow, adapt, regenerate, and sometimes wither. They are shaped by history, environment, and interaction. Caring for them requires contextual knowledge, humility, and learning. The steward of a forest does not command and control, but understands the conditions under which it can thrive. Their relationship is equal and respectful, not extractive.

This shift—from machine to forest—captures the heart of Ang’s paradigm shift.

A Living Forest of Ideas

From this paradigm has grown a living forest of ideas. Polytunity names the moment that makes a paradigm shift necessary, indeed urgent. AIM provides the new intellectual foundation. From it, more concepts, theories, and ideas sprout across Ang’s body of work—such as directed improvisation, meta-institutions, coevolutionary development, unbundling corruption, and more—crisscrossing normally separate domains, ranging from geopolitics, US-China relations, to Chinese development and public finance.

China serves as a crucial empirical foundation where many of these ideas were first demonstrated, but the AIM paradigm travels. The forest is not bounded by one country or discipline. It is open to extension, application, and reinterpretation across regions and sectors.

This website maps that forest. The Glossary defines ideas precisely. Other pages introduces Ang’s books and teaching, or list her publications for easy access. This page offers orientation: a way of seeing how the trees fit together, and why they belong to a single family.

Why Paradigms Matter

Most debates focus on answers. Paradigms determine, first and foremost, which questions get asked.

By reframing disruption as polytunity and advancing AIM, Ang invites readers to reconsider how we can rethink and even reshape the post-2025 world order. Normally, changing paradigms is slow, or even impossible. But when old operating systems no longer fit a disrupted reality, change becomes unavoidable.