After the Illusory Carnival

As Tang Shiping dissects the “poverty” of China’s mainstream economics, his call for intellectual renewal echoes—and complicates—the broader debate on China’s knowledge system.

When The Economist published its July 2024 Chaguan column “The Nationalism of Ideas,” it offered a familiar interpretation of China’s latest intellectual movement: Xi Jinping calls for an “independent Chinese system of knowledge,” and a disciplined academic world promptly begins to theorize it. The piece was written in the magazine’s well-known register—sharp, ironic, and faintly amused. That tone is not unique to China coverage; it is the publication’s house style, applied with equal skepticism to Washington’s moralizing, Brussels’s bureaucracy, and Beijing’s ambitions alike. Still, its framing touched on a real and difficult question: are China’s scholars thinking freely, or are they simply moving in step with political cues?

The truth, as usual, resists neat summary. China’s social sciences occupy a peculiar position—highly institutionalized, closely watched, and yet full of genuine curiosity about the country’s transformation. Many leading scholars have studied and taught abroad, absorbed international methods, and later found those same methods oddly inadequate for explaining their own society. Others work entirely within domestic systems, balancing intellectual pursuit with institutional expectation. The result is a dense mix of conviction, adaptation, and self-censorship, where professional and political incentives constantly overlap.

Figures such as Yao Yang, Zheng Yongnian, and Tang Shiping have at different times voiced dissatisfaction with what they see as the limitations of their disciplines: that Chinese economics and political science rely too heavily on Western frameworks, that local realities are often shoehorned into foreign models, that academic prestige sometimes outweighs substantive understanding. Whether these reflections consciously echo the leadership’s vocabulary of “independence” and “self-confidence” is hard to say. For some, the resonance is incidental; for others, it may be strategic. But in many cases the criticism itself—of excessive imitation, of weak empirical grounding, of detachment from social practice—predates the political slogans now attached to it.

At the same time, not every voice in the conversation carries equal weight. Alongside those offering thoughtful, evidence-based critique are others who treat the same themes as little more than an opportunity to demonstrate political sensitivity. The line between sincere engagement and formulaic compliance remains thin. Yet it would be a mistake to assume there is no thinking taking place at all. For many Chinese scholars, these debates are also a search for professional purpose: how to make their disciplines relevant to a society still changing faster than its theories can explain.

Against this background, Fudan University’s Tang Shiping recently published a pointed comment, “The Hollowness and Poverty of China’s (Mainstream) Economics.” It examines what he sees as the discipline’s misplaced pride in “internationalization” and its ritual admiration for Western orthodoxy. Tang calls for research that engages more seriously with the wider world and contributes knowledge that is actually useful beyond China’s borders.

Before we get to the text itself, a word about Tang Shiping.

Tang is an unusual figure in Chinese social science — unusual not just by Chinese standards, but by global standards. Trained first as a natural scientist, he started in biology, earning degrees in paleontology, molecular biology, and genetics before moving into policy and theory. He later re-trained in international relations and political science, and then, just to complicate matters for anyone trying to file him neatly under one discipline, published a book with Princeton University Press in 2022 on the institutional foundations of economic development — essentially an economics/political economy book that tries to build a general account of how states, rules, and incentives shape long-term development.

In other words: biologist → international relations theorist → institutional economist. That is not a normal CV.

Inside the field, Tang is widely regarded as one of the most internationally visible social scientists working in Asia today. His 2013 book The Social Evolution of International Politics (Oxford University Press) won the International Studies Association’s Annual Best Book Award in 2015 — he was the first Chinese, and in fact the first non-Western, scholar to receive that prize. His later work ranges from theories of institutional change to developmental economics to computational social science, and it includes multiple single-authored volumes in English with major academic presses. He was elected one of the three vice-presidents (2025–26) of the International Studies Association (ISA), the main global professional association in international relations — the first China-based scholar chosen to that role by election. He has also served on editorial boards (or as editor) at journals that sit at the very center of the international relations discipline, including International Security and Security Studies. For a Chinese scholar, that kind of access to agenda-setting journals is still extremely rare.

At home, Tang has another reputation: he is blunt. He writes in a way that many Chinese academics would quietly agree with in private, but would not publish under their own names. He has publicly dismissed some celebrated strands of Chinese social-science and intellectual life as parochial, unempirical, or self-congratulatory; he has argued that parts of Chinese mainstream economics are “hollow”; he has suggested that certain heavily funded lines of historical or theoretical work are, essentially, a waste of public money; and he has done so in print, in Chinese, under his own signature. That habit has occasionally made more traditional, domestically established scholars uncomfortable — but it has not made him marginal. On the contrary, he holds senior titles at Fudan University in Shanghai.

That combination — high standing inside the system, high visibility outside it, and very little instinct for diplomatic phrasing — makes Tang not an outsider taking shots for sport; he is not a junior voice trying to impress nationalist sentiment; and he is certainly not a Western commentator projecting from distance. He is someone embedded in China’s academic institutions who is willing to say, in public, that large parts of Chinese mainstream economics are performing for metrics, imitating the United States, and failing to produce ideas that matter to the rest of the world.

You will see in his argument the broader tension this newsletter opened with. His critique here is not a loyalty oath. It is a disciplinary complaint: after decades of training talent, spending money, and chasing prestige, what exactly is Chinese economics giving back — not just to China’s policymakers, but to the developing world that now studies China the way China once studied the West?

What follows is the full English translation of Tang Shiping’s comment, first published in a WeChat blog 政治经济学新时空 on October 18, 2025. - Zichen Wang

唐世平|中国的（主流）经济学的苍白与贫困：虚幻狂欢后的重新定位？

Tang Shiping | The Hollowness and Poverty of China’s (Mainstream) Economics: Repositioning After an Illusory Carnival?

Each year, Chinese (mainstream) economics community enjoys a brief, weeklong carnival. In the days following the announcement of the so-called “Nobel Prize in Economics,” WeChat Moments and Weibo fill with endless interpretations of the laureates. Now and then, someone posts a photo or anecdote about meeting one of them (especially if the laureate offered them a few words of encouragement or praise). The subtext is plain: “We understand the ‘Nobel Prize in Economics,’ therefore we stand above the rest.”

Behind this ritual lies deference of Chinese (mainstream) economics to Western (mostly American) mainstream economics. Through this performance, Chinese (mainstream) economics seeks to send at least three messages to the country’s social-science community and to the public. First, because there is a so-called “Nobel Prize in Economics,” Chinese (mainstream) economics can present itself as close to “science,” and Chinese economics accordingly stands above the rest (mainly over political science and sociology). Second, Chinese mainstream economics is “aligned with the world” precisely because it follows Western orthodoxy; in that sense, it is internationalized. After all, Chinese economists know how to interpret the so-called prize. Third, Chinese mainstream economics holds out the prospect of admission into the Western mainstream, and might even win the “Nobel” itself.

Yet this annual carnival does nothing to conceal the hollowness and poverty of Chinese mainstream economics.

First, what passes for the “internationalization” of Chinese mainstream economics is merely Anglicization, because it lacks a global horizon. To be precise, it simply takes Chinese data and renders episodes of Chinese history, anecdotes, and even common sense, into English, without research grounded in a genuinely global perspective. Thus, even at its best, this economics remains self-congratulatory at home.

Second, Western mainstream economics has contributed little to the world at large, offering scant usable knowledge for developing countries, even though their development is one of the most urgent tasks facing the world. Therefore, so long as China’s mainstream economics continues to grovel before Western orthodoxy, it is unlikely to contribute much to the world either.

At this point, some Chinese (mainstream) economists may object: over the past decades of reform and opening up, certain Chinese economists have offered many important policy recommendations—doesn’t that constitute the most significant contribution of Chinese (mainstream) economics? This, of course, should be acknowledged: some Chinese economists have indeed provided important policy advice. But they are, after all, few.

Then what, exactly, is the purpose of training so many master’s and doctoral students in Chinese (mainstream) economics? My answer is: Chinese (mainstream) economics needs to find its stage in the world; in fact, that stage is already at hand. However, if Chinese economics cannot create knowledge useful to the world, that will be a colossal failure: the state has invested vast sums to train wave after wave of master’s, PhDs, and professors—what (social) return is there?

Hence, I call on Chinese economics—mainstream and non-mainstream alike—to commit to contributing to the world. I strongly contend that Chinese economics must move beyond mere Anglicization to genuine internationalization and a truly global outlook. To that end, Chinese economics must at least do the following three things.

First, recalibrate the discipline’s key performance indicators (KPIs): publishing in the so-called Top Five journals of mainstream economics cannot be treated as a lifetime achievement. The social sciences exist to create knowledge that is genuinely useful to humankind—knowledge that makes tangible contributions to the real world, for the social sciences have, from the outset, been practice-oriented. In the end, the only meaningful yardstick is how much genuinely useful knowledge you contribute to the world.

Second, roughly 90%—even 95%—of Chinese economics focuses solely on China. Even research on China’s trade and investment with other countries, or on the impact of China’s trade and investment on them, remains very limited. Only about one-third—at most one-half—of Chinese (mainstream) economists need focus on China; the remaining two-thirds or half should study the wider world. China is today the first truly globally influential non-Western economy, and its influence extends well beyond currency and finance. Through manufacturing, trade, services, and its industrial chains, China is woven into the world—and the world into China. This economic weight gives Chinese economics a far broader arena, but it requires economists to “open their eyes to the world,” not just to the West, but even more to the non-Western world. Chinese economics must cultivate a perspective and vision that reach beyond China and beyond the West. It should no longer be a “frog at the bottom of a well,” peering only at China and the West. (By my limited understanding, this applies to many ethnic Chinese economists overseas as well; few pursue research with a truly global horizon.)

Third, Chinese economics needs to found journals that are genuinely international. At present, the only English-language economics journal founded by a Chinese scholar is the Chinese Economic Review, and it publishes almost exclusively on China. China & World Economy likewise focuses mainly on China, with at most some work on trade and investment. This fully reveals how rarely Chinese economics engages with other countries—Western or non-Western.

A truly international new journal should shift its core focus away from China and toward the world, especially developing countries. I venture a few possible titles: Journal of New Development Economics, Political Economy of the Global South, and Chinese Journal of Development Economics.

A sweeping global transformation is unfolding before our eyes. For Chinese (mainstream) economics and the other social sciences, this is an unprecedented moment. If Chinese (mainstream) economics remains insular, self-satisfied, or unwilling to engage earnestly with practice, it will miss this transformation and go on working on trivial, nonessential matters (or wasting time). To put it bluntly, the vast majority of Chinese (mainstream) economics appears to be doing exactly that: pursuing trivialities and chasing a few more Top Five publications.

At this point, some Chinese (mainstream) economists will surely accuse me of “sour grapes”: as a non-(mainstream) economist, aren’t you just envious of Chinese (mainstream) economics? Hardly. I have long been unconvinced by (mainstream) economics. Moreover, it is overwhelmingly likely that, in my lifetime, no Chinese (mainstream) economist will win the so-called “Nobel Prize in Economics” (which is not a Nobel Prize to begin with). Why? First, the selection committee is composed almost entirely of Western scholars, with scarcely any Chinese members. Second, Chinese economists lack a global horizon (and few study the West) and have made few theoretical contributions of broad significance. If anything, the “sour grapes” should be far more acute among Chinese (mainstream) economists!

Besides, although I lack formal training, I have published several economics papers and an English-language monograph, The Institutional Foundations of Economic Development. I therefore consider myself to have at least some standing to offer a few “unpleasant truths” to Chinese (mainstream) economics.

The Institutional Foundation of Economic Development. By Shiping Tang. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022

Ultimately, I dare to offend certain quarters of China’s (mainstream) economics in the hope that Chinese economics can rediscover its mission, redefine its aims, and make contributions of genuine significance to the world.

My “unpleasant truths” apply equally—indeed more so—to certain Chinese “non-mainstream economics,” especially those engaged almost entirely in text-to-text studies without any actual empirical research.

Addendum: In terms of genuine internationalization, Chinese international relations has, in fact, taken the lead, largely by virtue of the field’s inherent orientation. Journals of Chinese international relations all display a distinctly global focus: they look beyond China. In particular, thanks to the sustained efforts of Professor Yan Xuetong and his colleagues, the field now includes the Chinese Journal of International Politics (CJIP) and the Quarterly Journal of International Politics. In the broader political-science arena, there are Fudan University’s Chinese Political Science Review and Renmin University of China’s World Politics Studies, among others. [To be clear, this is not an attempt to gild the reputation of China’s international relations community; I long ago ceased to regard myself as merely a scholar of international politics.]

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