Yuen Yuen Ang

Yuen Yuen Ang is a Singaporean professor of political science and author of two books: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), named one of the "Best Books of 2017" by Foreign Affairs, and China's Gilded Age (2020). She is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University.

Ang was born in Singapore. She studied at Colorado College and received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2010.

Ang was an assistant professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in 2010–2011, and in 2011 became an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. On 12 January 2023, she became the first newly named professor at the Center for Economy and Society (CES) and the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Ang's research focuses on the interactions between industrial development, technological innovation, and political structures, with an emphasis on China.

She is also active in public policy debates, and her opinion columns have been published in Foreign Affairs and Project Syndicate, among others. She has been interviewed on Freakonomics Radio and the Ezra Klein Show, among other outlets.

In 2023, Ang was appointed Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University.

Ang describes China's decentralized economic policymaking process as "directed improvisation", in which the central government establishes policy directives and local governments determine policy details and implementation.

In her 2016 book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Ang writes that the Chinese state harnessed weak institutions to develop markets and provided favorable conditions for institutions and markets to mutually develop.