Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the first named chair at JHU’s Center for Economy & Society, a multidisciplinary program established to find alternatives to traditional economic thinking.
Ang’s scholarship operates simultaneously at the epistemological and empirical levels. At the epistemological level, she challenges mechanical thinking and Western benchmarks in political economy. She proposes an alternative paradigm: AIM— Adaptive, Inclusive, and Moral Political Economy. AIM formalizes the system of ideas and methods that Ang developed across her scholarship, especially her award-winning books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), both featured in the INET series: The Economics of China.
Framing the current moment of global disruption as polytunity—rather than as polycrisis—Ang argues that the breakdown of the post-1945 order presents a rare opening for a paradigm renewal grounded in AIM principles: Societies are complex, not complicated (Adaptive); multiple pathways exist beyond Western benchmarks (Inclusive); power shapes ideas (Moral).
Over the years, Ang has applied AIM to illuminate major questions on Chinese development and US-China relations. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap applies AIM to explains China’s transformation after market liberalization, focusing on its adaptive logic of “directed improvisation” and “using what you have.” China’s Gilded Age explains why China’s economy grew despite corruption by comparing it directly with America’s nineteenth-century Gilded Age, rather than treating China as a deviation from Western norms of good governance.
Extending these themes, her 2022 essay The Clash of Two Gilded Ages, challenges the stereotype of China and the US as civilizational opposites, reframing the relationship as a parallel struggle with the excesses of capitalism, under autocracy and democracy respectively.
To learn more about Ang’s work, visit her website at https://www.yuenyuenang.org/. It hosts a glossary centered on AIM that defines key concepts across her research and writing. Johns Hopkins has also launched a blog series marking the tenth anniversary of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, revisiting the book’s signature ideas through excerpts and video lectures.
