yuen yuen ang 

Short bio: Yuen Yuen Ang (洪源远) is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, based in Washington DC. She is an award-winning scholar, author, and teacher with a cross-disciplinary and global reach. She is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China's Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as "game-changing." She has received multiple awards across academic disciplines - political science, economics, and sociology - including the Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics." She is a Trustee of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, a guardian of the Trust Principles of independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in news reporting. Apolitical (UK) named her among the world's "100 Most Influential Academics in Government," based on nominations from policymakers. Foreign Affairs, a premier outlet on US foreign policy, named her writing among the "Best of Books" and "Best of Print." Ang's work and opinion is featured in media outlets around the world, from the Global North to the Global South, including CGTN Visionaries, Die Zeit, Endgame, Freakonomics, Pengpai, The New York Times, to name a few. She advises multinational companies and global development agencies such as UNDP on development and innovation, China's economy and its global role, and US-China relations. Ang has a distinctly multicultural background: she is a Singaporean citizen, a scholar trained and based in the US, who studies China. 

Scholarship & Service: In 2023, Ang joined Johns Hopkins University, the SNF Agora Institute and Department of Political Science. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics," awarded by the American Political Science Association. She has received book awards across multiple social sciences: the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics), and Barrington Moore Prize (honorable mention, historical sociology). She is named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.” She serves on many editorial and award committees, including at the American Political Science Association, American Sociology Association, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, The China Quarterly, World Politics, etc.  

Her new research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Her latest projects examine whether China's state-led innovation drive actually work, focusing on patents and government investment funds. Another project studies patterns of Chinese policy communication and lawmaking using automated text analysis. Her multicultural background helps her see and demonstrate that America and China, despite being competitors, share more similarities than most people think. See her essay "The Clash of Two Gilded Ages," which was discussed at the Ezra Klein Show. 

Teaching: Ang received the Tronstein Award for "innovative and outstanding teaching." In 2023, Ang received a Nexus grant to co-teach "China and the World," with John Yasuda, at JHU's Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. She also lectures at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

Public engagement: Ang is a public-facing scholar who believes that knowledge should be widely shared, not only with elites, but with people who wish to learn or hear a different perspective. In 2021, Apolitical named Ang among the world's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government for "research that resonates with policymakers and has the potential to steer the direction of government." Ang is frequently invited to speak to academic, business, civil society, and policy communities around the world. She has advised multilateral organizations including the UN and UNDP, national development agencies such as FCDO (US) & NORAD (Norway), the US State Department, and companies engaged in China and emerging markets.  

Ang has been profiled in outlets worldwide, including CGTN, Chosun, Die Zeit, Endgame, Freakonomics, Jiemian (界面), Pengpai (澎湃), The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times. In addition to being a columnist at Project Syndicate (which reprints op-eds around the world in multiple languages), she also writes for major intellectual and media outlets such as Boston Review, Foreign Affairs, Pengpai, and The New York Times. In her public speaking, she aims to explain complex topics simply but without oversimplifying (see her TED-like talk "How the West & Beijing Got China Wrong.")

Background: Two 'Ms' - multiculturalism and marginality - have had a formative influence on Ang's scholarship, advising, and public service. First, Ang is a cultural nomad. A native and citizen of Singapore, she received a transformative liberal arts education at Colorado College and her PhD at Stanford University, teaches in America, studies China, and travels and speaks around the world. Everywhere she goes, she is an outsider. This experience has forced her to be "like water," willing and able to adapt to varying environments. Second, she is an intellectual nomad, who crosses academic, policy, and corporate boundaries, and weaves threads from political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and history into a multidisciplinary style of thinking. Non-academics might think this sounds cool, but, no (!), in academia, nomadism is a career-killer (as legend goes, when Max Weber said, "I am not a donkey, I don't have a field," he lost his job). She is fortunate, thus, that Johns Hopkins has given her a home to think freely.  

Throughout her life, Ang has failed to fit and stay in boxes. Growing up in Singapore, she ranked at the bottom of a school designed to send students to Cambridge and Oxford. She had a knack for seeing that the questions in exams were wrong, but nobody was supposed to question the answers, let alone the questions. Her worst grades were in social science and English writing, the two subjects on which she makes a living today. 

Ang's work challenges multiple orthodoxies in political economy. She critiques propagandistic, simplistic portrayals of Chinese development as the result of top-down control; geopolitical theories that paint the US and China as two irreconcilable "civilizational" opposites; binary views of China either taking over the world or collapsing; Orientalistic assumptions of "Chinese exceptionalism;" the artificial "machine-like," linear assumptions applied to development and political-economic theories; the assumption that first-world institutions are universally ideal institutions; the denial of "the corruption of the rich" in conventional corruption concepts and metrics; the monopolization of canons by the most powerful demographic group; perverse incentives in the knowledge industry; and more. She gets into some trouble for all of this, but she also finds the truest friends and supporters because of it. 

As a China expert, Ang is committed to promoting balanced, evidential discourse on China's domestic landscape and US-China relations, amid great power competition and ideological polarization. 

As a woman and minority, she strives to raise awareness about structural inequalities and hidden biases in elite circles and knowledge production. 

Her status of marginality - never completely belonging anywhere - is her well of creativity and empathy, pushing her to see the world through multiple cultural lenses and communicating with diverse audiences in humanizing ways. 

Quotes 

"Like Skocpol, her work pushes us to rethink existing theories, concepts, and categories in comparative politics." 

~ APSA Theda Skocpol Prize Committee ~ 

"How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas... and should have a major impact across many social sciences." 

~ ASA Viviana Zelizer Book Award ~ 

"A field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes" 

~ Peter Katzenstein Book Award ~ 

"Yuen Yuen Ang’s eclectic intellectual and methodological approach ensures the book’s appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience." 

~ SASE Alice Amsden Book Award ~ 

"This outstanding book has already made substantial waves in academia and in policy circles."

~ SIOE Douglass North Book Award ~ 

"I'm very grateful for the moral and analytical clarity you bring to this point [innovation among non-elites]."

~ Matt Lord, Senior Editor, Boston Review ~ 

"Let me tell you what kind of talented research she has done. She used a new approach to study contemporary China by applying complex systems thinking... She does both qualitative and quantitative methods, [which] gives a richness often lacking in [using only one method]... She takes a balanced view of China, neither trying to criticize nor excuse China." 

~ Emeritus Professor William Hsiao, Harvard University (link) ~ 

"A China scholar at Johns Hopkins University, who’s done pioneering work on understanding China’s political system... [Her perspective] has pretty profound implications. Or at least, it is an interesting way of thinking about how we are governed here [in the United States]." 

~ Ezra Klein, Columnist & Podcast Host, The New York Times ~ 

"One of the most powerful and fascinating pieces we’ve done in some time.” 

~ Stephen Dubner, Co-author of Freakonomics, on Ang's interview in Freakonomics Radio ~ 

“I am perhaps a simple woman, not particularly scholarly but I recognize quality work and discussion when I see it or hear it.”

“It was so consuming I had to simply stop my car and sit there listening.”

“Probably the thing I appreciate the most is your willingness to step back, look at the paradigms and ask, can we do better?" 

~ Listeners of Ang's episode on Freakonomics ~ 

selected lectures

featured interviews

CONTACT

Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy 

Johns Hopkins University

SNF Agora Institute & Department of Political Science 

Office Address: 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, Room 558V, Washington DC 20001 (beginning Sep 2023)

For all inquiries and speaking engagements, please email: yuen.yuen.ang[at]jhu.edu