He is the William Claude Reavis Professor in the Department of Political Science and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost on Global Initiatives at The University of Chicago.
Between 2010 and 2016, he was the founding Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, a university-wide initiative to strengthen exchanges and collaboration with Chinese academic institutions.
[1] He also directed the Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago, an initiative to enhance support for faculty and student research on China (2010–14).
It shows the era of Mao Zedong went to the radical extremism of the Great Leap Forward and how the Maoist excesses were self-destructive and contributed to the post-Mao reforms in rural China.
However, Yang has parted company with scholars who believed China has evolved into some sort of Federalism, Chinese Style [6] that has played a market-preserving function.
These studies have allowed Yang to analyze "how China’s leaders have reformed existing institutions and constructed new ones to cope with unruly markets, curb corrupt practices, and bring about a regulated economic order."
According to Yang, "the Chinese leadership's emphasis has so far been on order rather than democratic ideals, technocratic control rather than popular participation (except at the grassroots level), governability rather than regime type.
"[8] The book offers one of the few academic studies of how China made the Chinese People's Liberation Army and other state institutions divest of their business empire.
[9] He dissected the tragic failures associated with the State Food and Drug Administration, which ended in the execution of Zheng Xiaoyu, its former commissioner, in 2007.
[12] Before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, he said in an interview with the South China Morning Post that the COVID-19 epidemic "will be a crisis of Chernobyl proportions, especially because we will have to contend with the virus for years to come.