Yuen Yuen Ang

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is a global thinker with China expertise. Her award-winning scholarship and public engagement not only bridges academia, policy, and media, but also fosters exchanges across regions of the world and across partisan lines within U.S. institutions. Ang is named among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical for “research that resonates with policymakers and has the potential to steer the direction of government.”

Ang’s cross-disciplinary research has been honored with multiple book and career prizes across political science, sociology, and economics. They include the inaugural Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics,” awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), the Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), the Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and honorable mention for the Barrington Moore Prize (historical sociology). She was also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.”

She is best known for her books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), both acclaimed as “game-changing” and “field-shifting,” and recommended by The Economist. The first book introduced the framework of “directed improvisation” to explain the process of China’s great transformation from the 1980s, while China’s Gilded Age pioneered the unique lens of illuminating contemporary China’s paradoxes through American history. Her journal articles have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Nature Human Behavior, The China Quarterly, and World Politics, and volumes edited by social scientists and China scholars at Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford University.

Building on this foundation, Ang’s current work advances a new paradigm—AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy—to meet the challenges of a disrupted, multipolar world. Moving beyond the paralysis of the polycrisis, she calls instead for a polytunity—turning disruption into a once-in-a-generation opening for deep, rigorous intellectual transformation.

One extension of AIM, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and in collaboration with computer scientists, uses large language models to study adaptive policy communication. She is also exploring how “directed improvisation” evolves as the Chinese leadership pushes for high-tech innovation, with her recent papers examining “China’s low-productivity innovation” drive and the efficacy of Government Guiding Funds (GGFs) as an industrial policy.

At Johns Hopkins, she directs The World & US-China Roundtable Series in Washington, D.C. In 2025, she received an award from the JHU Provost’s Office to host a Multipolar Forum with the American Enterprise Institute, fostering dialogue across nations and political perspectives.

Originally from Singapore, Ang received her BA from Colorado College and her PhD from Stanford University. Her office is at the JHU Bloomberg Center in Washington D.C.