Two "Humanity–Economy" Narratives: A Comparative Study of Zhang Keliang's "Cultural and Political Economics" and China's Mainstream "Humanistic Economics"

Abstract: This paper sets against one another, on the one hand, Zhang Keliang's "Cultural and Political Economics" — a framework proposed in 2017, completed as a manuscript in 2021 and formally published in January 2025 — and, on the other, the "humanistic economics" which, after the 2023 National Two Sessions, was elevated into a national thesis and is now being academicized and institutionally built out. It conducts a systematic comparison along nine dimensions — origin, disciplinary affiliation, unit of analysis, core mechanism, the determination of the human person, stance toward the logic of capital, policy interface, and institutional status — and offers an objective assessment of each. Taking the engine thesis "finance = relations of production" as a penetrating instrument of comparison, and the three-tier value structure (ideal · normative · utilitarian) together with its internal relations (subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function [ti–yong]) as the interface, the paper further exposes the deepest divergence between the two theories over the question of how the dominant power of modern society is to be understood. Three points must be firmly grasped. First, the internal relations of the three-tier value structure are subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function: the upper tier commands and dominates the lower, while at the same time both containing and explaining it and delimiting and regulating it; the three tiers stand in a dynamic equilibrium that is at once adaptive and tensile; and the ideal is the "substance" (ti) while the normative and the utilitarian are its "function" (yong). Second, the diagnosis of Western civilization is not a "rupture among the three tiers" but rather a binary split within ideal value, with all three tiers self-consistent upon the truncated ideal presupposition of the "rational economic man" — the root of "capitalism as the cancer of civilization" lies in the split and incompleteness of the ideal tier. Third, Zhang Keliang's theory is a diptych: Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise (inner volume: the reconstruction of civilization / outer volume: posing the problem of the rise of finance) plus the new book Capital, Finance and the State ("the gushing spring," a systematic reconstruction along the finance–relations-of-production axis); where propositions touching finance are concerned, the new book is authoritative. The basic judgment is this: the two share the same epochal motif — that culture and economy cannot be severed, and that the "humanistic deficit" of Western economics must be transcended — yet they belong to two distinct intellectual traditions. Humanistic economics is a constructive developmental discourse internal to the discipline of economics, taking the human person as its point of return; Cultural and Political Economics is a total social theory that takes "civilization" as its unit of analysis and "finance as the dominant relations of production" as its critical instrument. The two stand in a relation of "the same theme in different structures, upper and lower in mutual echo, surface and interior in mutual need," and there is substantial room between them for mutual learning and integration.

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Research Notes and Definition of Terms

• Definition one (humanistic economics): by "humanistic economics" this paper means the mainstream academic–policy discourse that emerged after March 2023, when it was proposed that "one might study the humanistic economics contained herein"; resting on Xi Jinping Thought on Culture and Xi Jinping Economic Thought, oriented toward constructing an autonomous knowledge system of Chinese economics, and rapidly institutionalized in universities and think tanks (including the "humanistic economics of the new era" articulated in the Xinhua National High-End Think Tank report The Humanistic Economics of the New Era). It is not equivalent to "humanomics" in the Western context, nor to other senses of humanistic economics.
• Definition two (Zhang Keliang's theory): by "Cultural and Political Economics" this paper means the theoretical system first proposed systematically by Zhang Keliang in Chapter 5 of How the New Third Board Is Changing China (Economic Science Press, November 2017), under the title "Cultural and Political Economics: A New Theoretical Framework," and fully developed in Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise — The Return and Transcendence of Chinese Civilization (Zhang Keliang and Huang Xiaoting, Guangming Daily Press, January 2025). The financial dimension of this system is reconstructed systematically in the new book Capital, Finance and the State ("the gushing spring," a monograph on socialist financial theory): the older book's outer volume "posed the problem" of finance, while the new book cashes it out as a complete system. According to the author, the manuscript of the theory was completed as early as 2021. The author briefly renamed its core unit of analysis "Civilization Structure Theory" in July 2026 and returned to the original name "Cultural and Political Economics" in September 2026; "Civilization Structure Theory" remains within the system as the concept of the internal unit of analysis (that is, the division of the cultural value system into the three tiers of ideal value, normative value and utilitarian value), but is no longer used as the formal name of the system. In order to respect the compared object's own name and its most recent usage, the body of this paper uniformly uses "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name, and "the three-tier value structure" when the unit of analysis is at issue. One point requires special emphasis: the full connotation of the "three-tier value structure" as used here is not exhausted by "being divided into three tiers"; it lies above all in the internal relations among the three tiers — subordination (the upper tier commands and dominates the lower; the lower belongs to and obeys the upper) + containment (the upper tier embraces and explains the changes of the lower) + delimitation (the upper tier draws boundaries for the lower and regulates it) + adaptation (the dynamic relation in which the three tiers are at once fitted to one another and in tension with one another, which is why there is order and disorder) + substance-function (the ideal is the "substance," the normative and the utilitarian are its "function"; the substance does not change while the function may be renewed). "Structure" answers the question "what is it"; "internal relations" answers "how is it organized" — and the latter is the living part of the framework.
• Principle of sources: the restatement of Zhang Keliang's theory is based on his two books (and the publishers' bibliographic information), on the author's own published theoretical statements, and on internally compiled notes on the theoretical system; no internet-mediated hearsay is relied upon. The section on "humanistic economics" is based on first-hand literature published between 2023 and 2026 (government websites, Xinhua, People's Daily Online, Guangming Daily, the Chinese Social Sciences website, university websites and academic journals). The evaluative parts are this paper's independent academic judgment and do not represent any official position.

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I. The Basic Profiles of the Two Theories

(1) Cultural and Political Economics: from the New Third Board problem to the question of civilization (2017–2025)

Zhang Keliang is a thinker who came out of capital-market practice: holding a master's degree in finance from Nankai University, he worked for many years on the front line of investment banking and equity financing, and from 2013 worked intensively on the New Third Board. The starting point of his theory was not the study but the concrete predicaments of Chinese capital-market reform. How the New Third Board Is Changing China, published in November 2017, takes the building of the New Third Board as its point of entry and discusses "the path and method of China's socio-economic reform"; the closing section of its fifth chapter, "The Theoretical Debate over China's Economic Development," is precisely "Cultural and Political Economics: A New Theoretical Framework." Already in that book the author uses this framework to reinterpret such issues as the dual-track system of the capital market and the dispute over liquidity, explicitly criticizes the then-fashionable views of mainstream economics, and argues that "a new economy and a new era require a new theory."

The author subsequently raised this framework from the problem-domain of the capital market to the level of a theory of civilization. Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise is divided into an inner volume, The Reconstruction of Civilization (chapters 1 to 5, dealing with the Axial Age, the thrust forward and alienation of Western civilization, and the paradigm of Cultural and Political Economics), and an outer volume, The Rise of Finance (dealing with financial capitalism and the reconstruction of a socialist financial system). Thereafter the author completed the new book Capital, Finance and the State ("the gushing spring"), devoted to the systematic reconstruction of the financial propositions that the outer volume of the earlier book had only "posed as problems" — the two books together constitute the complete Cultural and Political Economics: the older book sets the direction and builds the skeleton (civilization); the new book builds the institutions and fills in the muscle (finance). The older book is "the starting point and the road map"; the new book is "the cashing out and the deepening." The theoretical core may be summarized as three original contributions:

The first original contribution is Cultural and Political Economics (the name of the system as a whole) — a theory of the composition of history and society built upon the skeleton of "the three-tier structure of the cultural value system + the three internal relations." The three-tier structure (ideal · normative · utilitarian) is only the "what"; the three-tier internal relations (subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function) are the "how it is organized": the upper tier (the ideal) commands and dominates the lower tier, while at once both embracing and explaining it (containment) and drawing its boundaries and regulating it (delimitation); the three tiers stand in a dynamic equilibrium of "being at once fitted to one another and in tension with one another" — when the tension runs out of control there is disorder, when adaptation succeeds there is order; and the ideal is the "substance" (ti) while the normative and the utilitarian are its "function" (yong), so that "the substance does not change, while the function may be renewed." From this is derived a precise reading of Chinese and Western civilization. In the West the lesion is not a "rupture among the three tiers" but a binary split within ideal value (through the three great movements of intellectual emancipation — the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment — faith and life, desire and reason were torn apart), which constructed the truncated ideal presupposition of the "rational economic man." After the bourgeois revolution its three-tier value system is in fact internally self-consistent (both capital as legal right and rational greed follow from that presupposition) — but self-consistent upon a truncated foundation: once the ideal tier collapses, the normative and utilitarian tiers built upon it must collapse with it, and this is the root of the "cancer of civilization." China, by contrast, does not naturally possess a "self-repairing" mechanism; rather, by virtue of the cultural value structure laid down by its dual transcendent breakthrough, by an institutional legacy of "elevating ritual and weighting law," "valuing the root and ordering the branches" and the arts of "weighing the light and the heavy," and by sustained historical efforts at reconstruction through the agrarian, modern and New China stages (including New China's own "stage of reconstruction and adaptation"), it has continually entered new forms of civilization through civilizational reconstruction, and thus has continued unbroken for five millennia. This account stresses agency, not a natural capacity for self-repair.

The second original contribution is the thesis of the dual transcendent breakthrough. Continuing the Axial Age research of Karl Jaspers and Jin Guantao, it holds that the transcendent breakthrough of the Axial Age divides into two dimensions, the "inward" (settling the individual's life and death) and the "outward" (solving the rise and decline of social organization). The Hebrew religious type and the Indian religious type each completed only the "inward" breakthrough (departure from this world, lacking normative value); the Greek type of cognitive will completed only the "outward" one (lacking the first breakthrough, its second being a flower in water and a moon in mist). Only China's type of "will to the good" completed both breakthroughs at once (as in the Guanzi and the Shangshu), thereby establishing the first complete and unified cultural value system in human history — which is the fundamental mechanism explaining why Chinese civilization has not broken for five thousand years.

The third original contribution is the proposition that finance is the relations of production (posed as a problem in the outer volume of the older book, systematized in the new one). Funds are the principal form in which the means of production appear in modern society; the financial system determines the form of ownership, the position of the human person in production, and the mode of distribution, and is therefore the relations of production of modern society; and who controls the financial system determines the nature of the state — when the state controls capital it is socialism, when capital controls the state it is capitalism. The matching of productive forces and relations of production in modern society is equivalent to the matching of the real economy and the financial system, and the principal contradiction is the relation among the "government — finance — real economy" triad. Chapter 5 of the older book further proposes that "finance becomes an independent layer": finance is separated out from the "economic base / superstructure" pair, turning a two-layer relation into a three-layer relation (economic base — finance — superstructure) — politics does not intervene directly in the economy through administrative power, but regulates it indirectly through the financial system. On this basis the new book systematizes the one-to-one correspondence of "three forms of finance (banking / capital market / public finance) ↔ three forms of capital (debt / equity / public) ↔ three instruments of regulation (monetary policy / fiscal policy / capital policy)." From this follow the further claims that "governing the state is like commanding an army: one must seize the commanding height of finance"; the critique of the three stages of financial capitalism (commercial — industrial — financial capitalism, entering after the 1970s the stage of G–G′, money begetting money); the three directions of reconstructing a socialist financial system (marketization at the micro level, people-centeredness at the macro level, and raising the share of direct financing structurally); and the institutional design that takes the New Third Board as its test field and "nation–capital integrated mixed ownership" as its destination. The new book adds two further key original contributions. The first is the "wave–particle duality of finance": the particle aspect is the concrete financial instrument (corresponding to the dimension of productive forces — technical and standardizable), the wave aspect is the financial system as a whole (corresponding to the dimension of the relations of production — institutional and pertaining to power), and "the perspective of observation determines the property that appears" — thereby upgrading "finance = relations of production" into a two-dimensional structure that can accommodate both properties. The second is "three-tier distribution": the first tier is meta-distribution (financial allocation, which determines the right to purchase, the right to dispose and the right to claim over incremental capital, that is, "who can set production in motion"); the second is the distribution of use-rights (market circulation); the third is the distribution of returns (to whom the fruits belong). It holds further that the government's "better playing of its role" should be anchored at the first tier, while the market's "decisive role" should be concentrated at the second, because "the third tier cannot patch the first."

On top of these three original instruments, Cultural and Political Economics is also equipped with a set of "conceptual public goods" capable of conversing with neighbouring fields: capital policy (a third instrument of macro-control, alongside monetary and fiscal policy); capital parity (the equal opening of capital to all types of agents); the first distribution of finance (the primary distribution in which financial structure determines the right to development and the distribution of wealth); patient capital (long-term value capital as against short-term speculative capital); and maternal-right distribution (the principle of redistributing financial resources among state, society and individual). The new book Capital, Finance and the State further enlarges this stock of concepts: the stabilization fund (the central bank contributing 20–30% as the subordinated tranche and raising 70–80% from society as the senior tranche, raised in a targeted way from low- and middle-income households, with excess returns transferred to social security, achieving permanent counter-cyclical regulation by "buying cheap and selling dear" — categorically different from the crisis-driven rescue funds of the West, and called by the author the modern expression of Sang Hongyang's "leveling and equalized transport" method of the Han dynasty); bank ownership (the pooling and allocation of funds in China being dominated by state-owned banks, so that the means of production are in reality under "bank ownership," as against the "private ownership of Wall Street capitalists" in the United States); nation–capital integrated mixed ownership (state capital investing through the New Third Board / Beijing Stock Exchange in excellent private enterprises to form "nation–capital integrated enterprises," as distinct from "nation and capital advancing together," in which the two merely "march abreast"); the community of free individuals (resolving the capital–labour antithesis through the capitalization of labour and "to each worker his shares"); and industrial renminbi versus petrodollar (a strategy of financial sovereignty). These concepts are not decorative terminology; they are the operational expression of propositions. One note is required: the author's further proposition of the "gas—liquid—solid three-phase transition of money" is acknowledged by the author himself as not yet mature, and he has expressly instructed that it "should not be generalized for now"; this paper does not employ it as a mature instrument of analysis.

Methodologically, the author holds that Marx's economic determinism, Weber's cultural determinism and Hirschman's political determinism complement one another and fuse into a comprehensive paradigm of "culture—politics—economy" interaction, with historical materialism as the backstop: culture is an interactive variable, not a determining one. The author further proposes that "practice and consciousness are two sides of one body": the social structure (economic / political / cultural structures, from the perspective of practice) and the cultural value system (ideal / normative / utilitarian, from the perspective of consciousness) are two sides of the same society; and, using the image of "the chicken and the egg," he stresses the active reaction of consciousness upon matter (this is a distinctive emphasis the author adopts in order to correct mechanical materialism; when used it must be faithful to the original meaning and must not be simplified into idealism). His proposition of "cultural presupposition" is especially crucial: Marx mainly studied "utilitarian value ↔ normative value" (economic base ↔ superstructure), and did not study "ideal value ↔ normative value / utilitarian value" — that is, the role of ideal value in "setting the track and drawing the boundaries" for institutions and the economy; this is precisely where Cultural and Political Economics adds the "cultural" dimension (two dimensions becoming three). As for its self-positioning, the author explicitly assigns the theoretical destination to the sociological tradition of historical sociology / the sociology of civilization, distinguishing it from general narratives of civilizational history, from Weberian one-way cultural determinism, and from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) of Jessop, Sum and others in European and American scholarship. The internal evidence is this: citing Lange, the author calls "the productive forces determine the relations of production" the "first law of sociology" and "the economic base determines the superstructure" the "second law of sociology," judging them outright to be sociological laws. After September 2026 the author returned to "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name and no longer uses "Civilization Structure Theory" as a label of disciplinary destination; but the unit of analysis remains "civilization," and the discipline remains sociology (historical sociology / the sociology of civilization) plus the study of civilization.

(2) Humanistic Economics: from a national thesis to academic construction (2023–2026)

"Humanistic economics" as a national discourse and a mainstream academic topic is generally acknowledged to have originated during the National Two Sessions of March 2023. While attending the deliberation of the Jiangsu delegation, Xi Jinping observed: "Above there is paradise, below there are Suzhou and Hangzhou — and Suzhou and Hangzhou are both cities that stand in the front rank of economic development. Where culture is highly developed, the economy likewise stays in front. One might study the humanistic economics contained herein." This thesis did not come from nowhere: during his tenure in Zhejiang, Xi had already discussed the "cultural economy" systematically — the 2006 essay "'Cultural Economy' Lights Up Zhejiang's Economy" defines the cultural economy as "a general term for the economization of culture and the culturalization of the economy, whose substance is the blending, interaction and integrated development of culture and economy," and stresses that "in the final analysis what must be highlighted is the single word 'human'." After Xi Jinping Thought on Culture was formally put forward in October 2023, "humanistic economics" was interpreted by the scholarly community as its economic implication, becoming the theoretical fulcrum of a Chinese modernization in which material and spiritual civilization are coordinated.

In the three years since, the topic rapidly completed a triple leap from thesis to institution:

• The layer of think-tank discourse: on 3 December 2023, at the Fifth World Media Summit (Nansha, Guangzhou), the Xinhua National High-End Think Tank released a think-tank report of some 30,000 characters, The Humanistic Economics of the New Era (in Chinese, English, French and Russian, published by Xinhua Publishing House), defining it as "a new paradigm of development that is people-centered and in which culture and economy blend and interact," and supporting it with numerous practical cases such as Anji's ecological transformation and Suzhou's cultural industries.
• The layer of doctrinal construction: scholars represented by Hong Yinxing of Nanjing University began the work of systematization. Hong states plainly that "humanistic economics is not a new disciplinary concept, but a doctrinal expression of the theory and practice in which the humanistic and the economic blend, mutually reinforce and bring out the best in each other"; its inner logic is "culture — human — economy," a closed loop of "using culture to cultivate the person — using the person to promote the economy — using the economy to nurture culture." He also proposes three directions for the high-quality development of the humanistic economy (making the cultural industries a pillar industry of the national economy; upholding the fundamental and innovating in culture; and the deep integration of culture with the digital economy and artificial intelligence). Luo Weidong of Zhejiang University distinguishes three meanings of humanistic economics — an economic theory imbued with the humanistic spirit; an economics equivalent to cultural economics; and a socialist economics that takes the prosperity and happiness of the whole people as its object — arguing that only the third truly constructs the underlying logic of Marxist political economy, and calling the move "from 'rational economic man' to 'social cultural person'" the paradigm revolution of humanistic economics. Li Xiangmin of the Nanjing University of the Arts, Gao Debu of Renmin University of China, Ren Ping of Soochow University, Hu Yu of Tsinghua University and Wei Pengju of the Central University of Finance and Economics have joined the construction from the angles of demarcation (humanistic economics is not cultural economics and not industrial economics; it is "a new world outlook and methodology"), disciplinary positioning ("humanistic economy" is a thought, "humanistic economics" is a new discipline), and philosophical foundation (replacing "rational economic man" with "cultural person").
• The layer of practice and institutions: Suzhou has become the sample city. In October 2023 Soochow University established the country's first Academy of Humanistic Economics; in February 2025 the "2025 Humanistic Economy Suzhou Forum" released Liu Shouying and others' The Humanistic Economics of the Suzhou Miracle (proposing the "humanistic market economy" and its four elements: humanistic human capital, humanistic government governance, humanistic entrepreneurial spirit and humanistic institutional rules) together with The Suzhou Humanistic Economics Typical Case Library. In January 2026 the Suzhou forum launched the "China Humanistic Economics Autonomous Knowledge System Construction Alliance" and released Research Report on the Indicator System of Chinese Cities' Humanistic Economic Development; the Jiangsu Academy of Humanistic Economics (jointly built by the Provincial Party Committee's Publicity Department, the Suzhou Municipal Party Committee and Soochow University) then began construction. In May 2026 the 2026 Forum on Building a Strong Socialist Culture, hosted by the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, included a humanistic economics sub-forum. In May 2026 Humanistic Economics: Connotation of the Era and Practical Samples, edited by Hong Yinxing (Jiangsu People's Publishing House), was officially launched, and is regarded as the key node at which this topic moved from "policy discourse" to "doctrinal paradigm." In the same period the "Philosophy Night Talk: Humanistic Economics and Suzhou" seminar, the Chinese Social Sciences website's 2026 thematic review, and the Jiangsu Provincial Federation of Social Sciences' "Academic Symposium on Constructing China's Autonomous Knowledge System of Humanistic Economics" were held in quick succession, so that in 2026 humanistic economics presents a posture of "policy — doctrine — practice" advancing in tandem on three levels. According to reports of July 2026, the "China Humanistic Economics Autonomous Knowledge System Construction Alliance" has attracted more than 30 universities and research institutes nationwide, initially forming an "institutional network" with Nanjing University — Soochow University — the Jiangsu Academy of Humanistic Economics as its core and multiple institutions in Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang coexisting alongside it.

It is worth noting that mainstream scholars' self-reflection on this topic has unfolded in parallel. The scholar interviews organized by Guangming Daily in October 2025 frankly concede that "existing research still stops at explicating its significance and function, or at analyzing cases of the humanistic economy, and remains insufficient in doctrinal rigor and systematization"; Gao Debu warns that cross-disciplinary participation may bring "the generalization of research"; Li Xiangmin states bluntly that "humanistic economics, as a new research hotspot, ought not to have everything stuffed into it." Scholars speaking at the launch event for Hong Yinxing's book in May 2026 further pointed out that "the current bottleneck of humanistic economics lies not in policy legitimacy but in doctrinal independence — how to step out of the status of a footnote 'in the service of policy' is a question that must be answered in the next stage." These provide a valuable internal perspective for our objective assessment.

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II. Systematic Differences: Nine Dimensions plus One Penetrating Comparison

The table below first sets out the full panorama; the analysis that follows unfolds section by section.

(1) The difference in origin and mode of knowledge production

Humanistic economics is a "thesis-first" mode of knowledge production: first comes the theoretical topic proposed by the highest leadership on the basis of observations of Suzhou and Hangzhou, then think tanks and the scholarly community fill in the doctrine. Its strength is an extremely powerful capacity to mobilize resources; its weakness is that academic autonomy is relatively constrained — the research agenda is largely prescribed by policy discourse. Cultural and Political Economics is a "problem-first" mode of individual knowledge production: an investment-banking practitioner, pressed by the predicaments he encountered at first hand in capital-market reform, produced a theory, and only then raised it in turn to the level of a theory of civilization. Already in his 2017 book Zhang Keliang states plainly that his writing is aimed at "the views of mainstream economics" and at "the contest over the right to speak on deepening reform," giving it a distinctly polemical character. The difference between these two modes of production determines the entirely different ecological niches the two subsequently occupy.

(2) The difference in disciplinary affiliation and unit of analysis

This is the most fundamental difference. Most participants in humanistic economics still regard it as a kind of "economics" — whether an economics that takes the human person as its root, a Chinese economics, or a new economic paradigm; its object remains always the economy, and the introduction of culture serves to explain and promote economic development better. Zhang Keliang explicitly refuses the disciplinary basket of economics: he states that his unit of analysis has never been "the economy" but "civilization," and that the economy corresponds only to the single tier of "utilitarian value" within the three-tier structure; hence, under the most recent usage of September 2026, "Cultural and Political Economics" is the formal name, "civilization" is the unit of analysis, and sociology is the disciplinary destination. One seeks change from within economics; the other establishes a paradigm from outside economics — this is a positional gap that is often overlooked in dialogue between the two, yet most needs to be confronted squarely.

(3) The difference in spatio-temporal scale and problem domain

Humanistic economics addresses "the riddle of the locality": why do cities with a deep cultural deposit, such as Suzhou and Hangzhou, also lead economically over the long run? From this derive meso-level studies of cultural empowerment, urban samples and indicator systems. Its problem domain is synchronic, regional and policy-oriented. Cultural and Political Economics addresses "the riddle of civilization": why is it that only Chinese civilization has continued for five thousand years without breaking? From this derive long-duration studies of the Axial Age, Sino-Western comparison and the rise and decline of civilizations, and it is within this civilizational scale that the present financial reform of China is to be understood. One fixes its gaze on "how to do better here and now"; the other asks "who we are, where we come from, and whither finance is going."

(4) "How culture works": the difference in mechanism

The mechanism chain offered by humanistic economics is "culture — human — economy": culture, by shaping a person's values, moral outlook and knowledge (cultivating the person through culture), makes that person a high-quality economic agent (the person promotes the economy), and economic development in turn nourishes culture (the economy nurtures culture). In this chain culture functions chiefly as values and morality — as informal institutions — and as the core of human capital; Hong Yinxing even proposes that moral norms are a "third form of regulation" alongside market and government. This is a functionalist explanation mediated by "the quality and norms of the person." The mechanism chain of Cultural and Political Economics is structural: culture is first of all stratified (ideal / normative / utilitarian), and the economy is only one tier within it; the role of culture is not a one-way "empowering" of the economy, but the interaction of the three tiers through the compound relations of "subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation" — the upper tier both draws boundaries for the lower (delimitation) and adjusts itself as the lower changes so as to embrace and explain it (containment), the three standing in a dynamic equilibrium of "at once fitting one another and tensing against one another." Where adaptation succeeds, civilization continues (China); where the ideal tier is itself split and truncated, so that containment and delimitation from above both fail and the lower tier expands without limit, the result is cancerous degeneration (the West). Culture is "important" in both cases, but the former treats it as a resource to be developed and a norm to be adjusted, while the latter treats it as the skeleton of civilization — and then asks a further question: in modern society, who "nourishes" and "dominates" this skeleton? The answer leads to finance.

(5) The difference in the place and determination of the "human"

Both hold high the banner of the "human," but the determination of the human differs. The human in humanistic economics is the people of "taking the people as the center," the subject of the needs of a better life, the "social cultural person" who is cultivated by culture and thereby transcends "economic man"; one of its theoretical aims is to liberate the human person from instrumental status. But it says little about the cultural determination of the "human" itself (by what the person settles his life and establishes his calling), and treats the human rather as the end and the active element of development. The human in Cultural and Political Economics is first of all a being settled by "ideal value" — the ultimate concern of the Axial Age was precisely to resolve the settlement of human life and death and the problem of social organization; at the institutional level the author proposes resolving the capital–labour antithesis through the "capitalization of labour" rather than its "commodification," and takes "the community of free individuals" as the destination of mixed-ownership reform. Comparatively speaking, humanistic economics supplies a normative foundation for the "human" (one ought to take the human as the root), whereas Cultural and Political Economics supplies an ontological foundation (how the human is settled) and an institutional one (how the community is to be organized).

(6) Stance toward the logic of capital: the deepest positional gap

This is the most profound parting of the ways between the two. The mainstream formulation of humanistic economics takes the basic framework of the market economy and the logic of capital as given, and proposes to correct its bias of "seeing things and not persons" with humanistic values, and to fill in the "gully of capital's profit-seeking" with morality and governance. Even when scholars such as Luo Weidong invoke Marxist political economy and criticize the chronic ills of the capitalist market economy, this remains on the whole a constructive revision from within the system; its critical edge is directed mainly at the paradigmatic defects of Western economics rather than at the institution of capital itself. Cultural and Political Economics, by contrast, is a total critique: capitalism is diagnosed as "the cancer of human civilization" (its lesion characterized by autonomy, invasiveness and metastasis); the stage of financial capitalism is judged to be one of money begetting money, of the financialization of the economy, and of financial globalization as a neo-colonialist trap; neoliberalism is identified as the ideology of the international financial bourgeoisie. Special note must be taken of the precision of its pathology: the author does not hold that the West's malady lies in "the three tiers being severed from one another" — quite the contrary, after the bourgeois revolution its ideal, normative and utilitarian tiers are internally self-consistent — but in the binary split and truncation within ideal value itself (the presupposition of the "rational economic man" severs desire from reason and then occupies one end alone): the three tiers are self-consistent upon a truncated blueprint, so that the more self-consistent they are, the faster they accelerate, and once the ideal tier collapses, capital as legal right (the normative tier) and rational greed (the utilitarian tier) built upon it must collapse along with it. Its conclusion is that socialism must achieve a total transcendence of the West precisely at the point of finance — "the relations of production of modern society" — and not merely patch things up morally at the level of cultural values. In other words: humanistic economics tries to make capital "warm," while Cultural and Political Economics tries to change capital's "structure of ownership and domination." The former is the language of reform; the latter is the language of reconstruction.

(7) How finance is understood: the tenth dimension of penetrating comparison

In order to render the above "stance toward the logic of capital" concrete and comparable, this paper adds a tenth dimension of comparison — "how finance is understood." This is the greatest watershed between the two theories at the ontological level, and also the deepest positional gap that any "mutual learning and integration" must confront.

In the system of Cultural and Political Economics, finance is defined in four steps:

1. Essential definition: funds are the principal form of appearance of the means of production in modern society, and the financial system is the concrete shape of the relations of production of modern society ("finance = relations of production"). The new book refines this further through "wave–particle duality": the same financial activity appears at the level of the concrete instrument as "particle" (a measurable instrument of the productive forces: loans, shares, options) and at the level of the system as a whole as "wave" (a credit network, risk pricing and capital-allocation rules diffused across the whole of society, that is, the relations of production); the perspective of observation determines the property that appears.
2. Determination of the state: who controls the financial system determines the nature of the state — when the state controls capital it is socialism, when capital controls the state it is capitalism. In contemporary terms this is realized as "bank ownership" (in China: state-owned banks dominate the pooling and allocation of funds, with the returns accruing to the state and to the whole people) as against "the private ownership of Wall Street capitalists" (in the United States).
3. Pathological diagnosis: the stage of financial capitalism (after the 1970s) has entered the form of G–G′ (money begetting money), constituting the signal of the "cancerous degeneration" of modern civilization.
4. Institutional prescription: the three directions of socialist financial reconstruction — marketization at the micro level (releasing vitality), people-centeredness at the macro level (holding the bottom line of distribution), and raising the share of direct financing structurally (optimizing the finance—real economy relation). The framework through which this lands institutionally is "One Body, Two Wings": the body is a multi-tiered capital market (the water-conservancy system); the first wing is the stabilization fund (sharing on the returns side); the second wing is venture capital / nation–capital integration (the supply of capital and the reconstruction of ownership).

These four steps together constitute a complete tetrad of "financial ontology — theory of the state — pathology — prescription." The first step is a definitional proposition, the second a determinative proposition, the third a historical-empirical hypothesis, and the fourth a policy norm. This posture of "one engine running through the whole tetrad" is what distinguishes Cultural and Political Economics from every school of humanistic economics: it does not treat finance as an instrument, a variable or a background, but as the master key to understanding modern society. The systematization in the new book also allows this tetrad to recurse through the three blocks of "civilizational theory — political economy — institutional design": the same yardstick of "who controls finance" is applied all the way from the diagnosis of civilization (cancerous degeneration) to the design of ownership (nation–capital integration), and this is the concrete evidence that "finance = relations of production" runs through the whole as an engine proposition.

In the system of humanistic economics, finance appears in quite another posture:

1. Finance is regarded as the blood of the economy, an instrumental existence providing financing services for the development of the cultural industries;
2. At the level of cultural-industry policy it is discussed in the concrete forms of "investing in people" (Hong Yinxing, 2026) and "cultural finance" (Wei Pengju and others);
3. Vigilance against capitalization stops at the level of "the disorders of excessive commercialization and capitalization" — a critique at the level of values and morality;
4. The essential proposition that "who controls the financial system determines the nature of the state" hardly ever appears.

This contrast reveals an asymmetry: humanistic economics discusses finance, but does not discuss it at the ontological level; Cultural and Political Economics raises finance to a core category at the ontological level, and thereby gains penetrating power — but thereby also pays the price of "being hard for the mainstream of economics to co-opt." This asymmetry is precisely the source of the greatest strength of each theory, and also the deepest difficulty in joining the two together.

(8) The difference in policy interface and real-world orientation

The policy language of humanistic economics is highly mature: building a strong socialist culture, culture–tourism integration, cultural digitization, the integration of culture and technology, humanistic-economy demonstration zones, cultural investment (investing in people), and the building of urban and rural spiritual civilization. These interfaces sit with the publicity and culture system and with local development departments. The policy language of Cultural and Political Economics is concentrated on finance and the capital market: the share of direct financing, a multi-tiered capital market (the New Third Board / Beijing Stock Exchange as "a test field for inclusive finance" and "the water-conservancy system of the capital market"), the commanding height and security of finance, the conception of "capital policy" as a third instrument of macro-control, and the mixed ownership in which state capital and private capital are "integrated as nation and capital." The two sets of language belong to different departments and agendas within the existing governance architecture, and this is the institutional reason why the two have had almost no dialogue to date. It is worth noting that the practical discourse of humanistic economics has in fact already touched upon the question of capital in the cultural field (Hong Yinxing in 2026 explicitly demands of the cultural industries that they "resolutely resist the disorders of excessive commercialization and capitalization"), but has not yet raised this to a systematic analysis of the institutional arrangements of finance — and this is precisely the interface at which Cultural and Political Economics can fill the gap. Conversely, while the policy language of Cultural and Political Economics concentrates on finance, its "investing in people" dimension and its principle of "maternal-right distribution" already touch upon cultural issues; what is lacking is an explicit docking mechanism with the policy language of the "humanistic economy."

(9) The difference in institutional status and reception

Humanistic economics possesses a complete institutional spectrum: national think-tank reports, the Central Propaganda Department's high-level forum, academies jointly built by ministries and provinces, university alliances for building autonomous knowledge systems, journal columns and book series, and indicator and case libraries; and it has entered the national agenda of "constructing China's autonomous knowledge system." It is already one of the most mobilizing emerging academic topics in contemporary China. Cultural and Political Economics inhabits an entirely different ecology: no academy, no scholarly community, no cycle of peer review; its main carriers are two books and a self-media account. The author himself once tried to "rename" the theory because its disciplinary affiliation was unclear, finally returning in September 2026 to the original name "Cultural and Political Economics" in search of stability. Such an institutional gap does not necessarily reflect a difference in intellectual value, but it does directly determine the intensity of a theory's testing, the breadth of its dissemination, and its capacity for intergenerational transmission.

(10) Temporal dislocation and significance for intellectual history

Placing the two time lines side by side reveals a suggestive dislocation: when Zhang Keliang proposed his framework in 2017 and completed the manuscript in 2021, "humanistic economics" did not yet exist, and "cultural confidence" and "the second combination" had only just entered the mainstream theoretical agenda (the "second combination" was formally put forward only in July 2021); yet by the time humanistic economics became a national thesis in 2023 and his book went to press in January 2025, the market for theory had already been rapidly occupied by institutionalized forces. This at least shows two things. First, Zhang Keliang's theory is not a follower of the "humanistic economics" vogue, but an independent pioneering attempt at "bringing culture into economics" forced out by the problem of finance — and it therefore has pioneer significance in intellectual history. Second, the pioneer does not necessarily seize the first opportunity: an original theory lacking institutional support is easily eclipsed by a mainstream discourse that comes later and overtakes it; its concepts (the three-tier structure, the diagnosis of civilization, finance = relations of production) could in principle have docked with the mainstream topic (the humanistic economy), but the window for dialogue was missed because of the severance of registers.

Summary

To put it summarily: humanistic economics is "the opening of the economy toward the humanistic," while Cultural and Political Economics is "the comprehension of the economy by civilization." The former invites culture back into economics as an endogenous variable; the latter puts the economy back into the civilizational structure as one cross-section within it. The two shake hands on the point that "culture matters," and part ways on the question of "what is to be done after culture" (moral improvement or structural reconstruction). One layer deeper: on the most crucial ontological question of "how finance is to be understood," the two present an almost mirror-image difference — humanistic economics treats finance as an instrument in the service of the humanistic, while Cultural and Political Economics treats finance as the master key to understanding how the humanistic is dominated. This is not a matter of which is right and which wrong, but a fundamental fork in theoretical ambition.

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III. Deep Connections: The Same Theme in Different Structures, Upper and Lower in Echo, Surface and Interior in Mutual Need

(1) A shared epochal motif

Both are responses to the same epochal question: against the background of the declining explanatory power of mainstream Western economics and of Chinese modernization's need for an autonomous theory, how to transcend "economism / seeing things and not persons" and rebuild the unity of culture and economy. Humanistic economics has to answer how "the coordination of material and spiritual civilization" is possible; Cultural and Political Economics has to answer how Chinese civilization can simultaneously sustain an ethical order and economic prosperity, and how it is to prevent the logic of capital from dissolving that unity. As regards the motif, the two are expressions of the same question at two different scales.

(2) A shared theoretical opponent

The common opponent of both is the "economic man" assumption of modern economics and its "humanistic deficit": humanistic economics corrects it with the "social cultural person," and Cultural and Political Economics replaces it with the human person within the three-tier value structure. The two therefore also share an intellectual genealogy within which dialogue is possible — the Weber thesis (how cultural ideas shape economic conduct) is a coordinate that neither can bypass: humanistic economics tests empirically at the regional level the economic effects of cultural endowments such as "revering culture and valuing education" and "attending alike to righteousness and profit," while Cultural and Political Economics explains mechanistically at the civilizational level why China was able to form endowments of this kind. The former may be seen as contemporary empirical research on the Weber thesis, the latter as its reconstruction in civilizational history — one empirical, one genetic, and precisely for that reason complementary.

(3) Shared intellectual resources and framework of legitimacy

Both draw upon the three resources of Marxism (especially the thought of the free and all-round development of the human person and of the coordination of the material and the spiritual), fine traditional Chinese culture, and the practice of Chinese modernization; both situate themselves within the general framework of the "two combinations" and the construction of an autonomous knowledge system. This is also why there is no fundamental ideological tension between them — the difference lies not in standpoint but in disciplinary path and critical depth.

(4) A family resemblance in methodology

Both oppose single-factor determinism and advocate multi-dimensional interaction: humanistic economics stresses the circularity of "culture — human — economy" rather than one-way causation; Cultural and Political Economics stresses the fusion of the three paradigms of Marx, Weber and Hirschman and explicitly rejects Weberian one-way cultural determinism. Both also aspire to be "a new paradigm" rather than a patch upon some existing field. This closeness in methodological temperament is a favourable condition for future dialogue.

(5) Parallel acts of demarcation

It is worth pondering that both are demarcating themselves from their Western "namesakes": scholars of humanistic economics distinguish China's "humanistic economics" from Western humanomics, human-centered economics and cultural economics, stressing that the former is rooted in Marxism and Chinese culture while the latter is confined by the logic of capital; Zhang Keliang, for his part, specifically draws the line against Western CPE (Jessop, Sum), stressing that its core concerns are different. This parallel act of demarcation shows that the two share a consciousness of "taking Chinese practice as the foundation and contesting for autonomous concepts" — they are in fact different echelons within the same movement for the right to speak.

(6) The complementary structure: surface and interior, upper and lower, explicit and implicit

• Surface and interior: humanistic economics is the "surface" — a development discourse oriented toward present policy and local practice, operable and assessable; Cultural and Political Economics is the "interior" — a meta-theory explaining the deep structure and historical legitimacy of Chinese civilization. Without the "interior," humanistic economics is easily dismissed as empirical description and a policy footnote; without the "surface," Cultural and Political Economics has difficulty obtaining a field of testing and a channel of dissemination.
• Upper and lower: humanistic economics focuses on the meso level (regions, industries), while Cultural and Political Economics runs through the macro level (civilization) and a micro-critical perspective (to whom finance belongs); together they cover precisely the scales each of them lacks.
• Explicit and implicit: humanistic economics makes "culture" explicit as resource, industry and norm; Cultural and Political Economics asks after the implicit structure that such explicitness conceals — behind the narrative of "the humanistic empowering the economy," who allocates the funds, who directs the capitalization of culture, and to whom the returns are shared. This line of questioning keeps the "humanistic economy" from degenerating into a new version of "culture sets the stage, capital sings the opera."

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IV. Objective Assessment

(1) The contributions and value of humanistic economics

1. The strategic character and practical pertinence of the thesis. It raises the empirical fact that "where culture is highly developed, the economy likewise stays in front" into a national theoretical topic, breaks the old notion that "culture is a luxury of the economy," supplies a "humanistic yardstick" for high-quality development, and pushes the policy system from the instrumentalism of "culture sets the stage, the economy sings the opera" toward an integral narrative in which culture and economy are symbiotic. In the history of development discourse this is a substantial advance.
2. The effectiveness of institutionalization and knowledge mobilization. Within a mere three years it completed an institutional chain running from thesis to think-tank report, academy, disciplinary alliance, case library and indicator system — one of the most organizationally efficient cases in China's movement for an autonomous knowledge system. It has brought the "humanistic—economy" topic into university talent training and local development planning, and possesses a capacity for sustained production of knowledge. The expansion of the alliance in 2026 and the launch of Hong Yinxing's Humanistic Economics: Connotation of the Era and Practical Samples mark this institutional network's passage from a "formation phase" into an "output phase."
3. A paradigmatic reminder to mainstream economics. Taking the defects of the "economic man" assumption as its target, it converges with such international reflections as Amartya Sen's capability approach, the economics of happiness, and the study of culture and development, objectively constituting a powerful critique of Western economics' "humanistic deficit" and supplying a Chinese sample for the pluralization of economic research.
4. The methodological value of practical samples. Attempts such as the Suzhou sample, the four elements of the "humanistic market economy," and the indicator system of urban humanistic economic development provide an observable and comparable empirical framework for "how culture is converted into economic performance," and lay a foundation for subsequent econometric identification.

(2) The doctrinal challenges humanistic economics faces

1. Conceptual boundaries and disciplinary independence are undetermined. Internal divergences currently coexist: Luo Weidong's "three meanings," Li Xiangmin's objection to conflation with cultural-industry studies, Gao Debu's warning against generalization. "The humanistic" refers at once to values and morality and to cultural creativity and lifestyle, and its operational definition is weak. As a "discipline," its object, categories and boundaries remain at a pre-paradigmatic stage.
2. Doctrinal rigor lags behind policy formation. Mainstream results consist chiefly in explicating significance and tracing origins, and in describing cases; the core mechanism (through which testable channels culture affects economic performance), original categories and formal instruments are still lacking. If this is not remedied, there is a risk of degenerating into a "policy footnote" and into sloganization — a shortcoming its own scholars have already conceded. The appearance in 2026 of Hong Yinxing's edited Humanistic Economics: Connotation of the Era and Practical Samples has given the topic for the first time a model that can "serve as a textbook"; but if it stops at "becoming a textbook" without rising to "becoming doctrine," it may still be covered over by newer discourses within three to five years.
3. The difficulty of empirical identification. That culture and economic development are highly correlated does not mean that culture "causes" development; Suzhou's achievement may be the confluence of institutions (the development-zone model), location (the Yangtze River Delta), human capital and culture. How to separate the cultural effect from institutional and locational effects, and how to handle reverse causation (economic development nourishing culture in turn), is the pass that will determine its scientific standing.
4. Insufficient dialogue with the existing literature. Culture and development (the empirical testing of the Weber thesis, Inglehart's post-materialism, social capital theory, the cultural economics of the Guiso–Sapienza–Zingales line) is already a mature field internationally; if Chinese humanistic economics cannot engage it explicitly and state its increment, it will face the taunt of "old wine in new bottles."
5. Critique of the logic of capital remains at the level of values. Mainstream formulations operate largely within the frame of "injecting the humanistic into the market economy," and lack a structural analysis at the level of the relations of production of the capitalization and financialization of the cultural field; this leaves their criticism of "the disorders of excessive commercialization and capitalization" without an institutional prescription. This shortcoming complements precisely the strength of Cultural and Political Economics at the level of financial ontology: if humanistic economics could borrow the perspective of "finance = relations of production" and translate it into the concrete proposition of "cultural-financial governance," it would gain a new doctrinal increment.

(3) The contributions and value of Zhang Keliang's Cultural and Political Economics

1. A high degree of originality and systematization. This theory rarely welds comparative civilizational study (the three-tier value structure, the dual transcendent breakthrough), the critique of Western intellectual history (capitalism as cancer) and the political economy of finance (finance as the relations of production) into a single explanatory system running through the history of civilization and modern finance. Whether or not individual propositions are open to question, the grandeur of its problem-consciousness and the boldness of its synthesis are seldom seen in the theoretical production of individual Chinese scholars today.
2. Priority in time and an independent genesis. Its framework was proposed in 2017 and its manuscript completed in 2021, both earlier than the 2023 national thesis of "humanistic economics"; and the theory does not set out from cultural policy but was forced out by the predicaments of capital-market reform — which makes it an independent, finance-driven path of genesis within the current of "bringing culture into economics," with intellectual-historical value that cannot be ignored.
3. It fills the dimension most scarce in humanistic discourse: finance and power. While humanistic economics still stops at "cultivating the person through culture and building industry through culture," Zhang Keliang already asks "to whom do the funds that support the humanistic economy belong." This "finance—relations of production" cut strikes precisely the blind spot of humanistic economics at present, and gives his vigilance against the capitalization of culture a basis in institutional analysis rather than mere moral appeal.
4. An explicit socialist normative standpoint and practical orientation. From "the state controlling capital" to raising the share of direct financing, from the New Third Board as a test field for inclusive finance in the capital market to "nation–capital integrated mixed ownership," from "the capitalization of labour" to "the community of free individuals," the theory offers a complete chain running from diagnosis to prescription, and it corroborates itself against the author's own practical experience in the capital market rather than being armchair speculation.
5. It supplies a civilizational foundation for "cultural confidence" and "the second combination." It turns cultural confidence from a slogan into a mechanistic explanation of "why Chinese civilization has continued," and provides a historically deep doctrinal support for the cultural narrative of Chinese modernization (the reviews by Yang Peifang and Jiang Qiping take the same view).

(4) The challenges and risks Zhang Keliang's theory faces

1. The absence of testing by a scholarly community. The theory's main carriers are individual writings and self-media; it has not been tempered by systematic peer review, critical citation and academic controversy. The precision of concepts and the qualification of propositions can be accomplished only through repeated encounter with peers, and this link is at present essentially missing. The review opinion (September 2026) has already systematically identified the N1–N6 items of logical hardening still to be supplied, five structural gaps and twelve improvement suggestions, among which "labelling the logical type," "cross-national meso-level comparison" and "matching propositions against data" are the most pressing tasks.
2. The tension between grand narrative and falsifiability. Propositions such as "civilization's unique continuity" and "capitalism as cancer" must face the strict testing of historiography and archaeology: how is "continuity" to be defined? How are possible counter-examples such as Indian civilization and Jewish civilization to be handled? How are "the binary split of ideal value" and "the failure of three-tier adaptation" to be measured (and these must be distinguished from "rupture among the three tiers," a formulation the author has already rejected)? Unless operational schemes and qualifying conditions are provided, a grand framework easily slides into unfalsifiable speculation.
3. A double estrangement from mainstream scholarship. Dialogue with the mainstream of finance (money and banking, corporate finance, market microstructure) is sparse, and professional peers may regard it as "grand but imprecise"; there is also a lack of systematic dialogue with the existing literature of Western CPE and comparative civilizational study (Kwang-chih Chang's "continuity—rupture" hypothesis being highly relevant to it), so that it easily reinvents the wheel or places itself outside the international academic lineage.
4. The theory is still in the process of fixing its own shape. The adjustments of name — from "Cultural and Political Economics" to "Civilization Structure Theory" and back to "Cultural and Political Economics" — show that the author's self-understanding of the unit of analysis and the disciplinary destination is still settling; after the return in September 2026 to "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name, the system has entered a period of stable naming. But the coordination between the internal unit of analysis ("civilization," "the three-tier value structure") and the formal name of the system ("Cultural and Political Economics") still needs to be made explicit in the text, so as to avoid confusing readers.
5. The boundary between "ideal type" and "empirical judgment." Propositions such as "determining the form of the state by the ownership of finance" and "nation–capital integrated mixed ownership" are, in the present context, forward-looking institutional designs rather than descriptions of the status quo; if readers misread them as empirical assertions about reality, unnecessary controversy will follow. The author would do well to distinguish normative claims from empirical propositions more strictly in his formulations.

(5) A brief overall assessment

• As regards intellectual increment: the increment of humanistic economics lies in writing the "human" and "culture" back into the mainstream development agenda (an increment of policy and discourse), while Zhang Keliang's increment lies in writing "civilization" and "financial power" into the explanation of the relation between culture and economy (an increment of doctrine and critique). The former wins on publicness and actuality; the latter on originality and penetrative power.
• As regards maturity: humanistic economics wins on organization and dissemination, and loses on doctrinal depth and critical profundity; Zhang Keliang's theory wins on systematic completeness and uniqueness of perspective, and loses on scholarly community, testability and the institutions of dissemination.
• As regards complementarity: take humanistic economics as the horizontal axis (policy, region, industry) and Cultural and Political Economics as the vertical axis (civilization, structure, finance), and what contemporary China needs is precisely an intellectual coordinate chart where the two intersect — and this is where the real opportunity for both sides lies. The engine key of "finance = relations of production" is the vertical axis of this chart; the chain of "culture — human — economy" is its horizontal axis. The point at which the two cross is precisely the as-yet-unanswered question: "what kind of financial institutional arrangement does the high-quality development of the humanistic economy require?"

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V. Proposed Paths of Mutual Learning and Integration (Upgraded Version)

1. Use the three-tier value structure to "locate the tiers" of humanistic economics. At present the results of humanistic economics are concentrated in the tier of "normative value" (moral regulation, an honest business environment, the third form of regulation) and the tier of "utilitarian value" (cultural industries, culture and tourism, the integration of science and technology); the tiers of "ideal value" (the supply of meaning, communal identity, the contemporary reconstruction of ultimate concern) and of "finance—relations of production" (the allocation of funds for the humanistic economy, the institutional constraints on the capitalization of culture) remain essentially untouched. Zhang Keliang's framework can mark out these two blank spaces explicitly, forming a differentiated contribution.

1. Use regional samples to mutually corroborate the mechanism. The "humanistic market economy" narrative of the Suzhou and Hangzhou samples (revering culture and valuing education, attending alike to righteousness and profit, government–enterprise coordination) can be explained structurally precisely as "the coupling of the regional normative-value tier with the utilitarian-value tier" — culture does not "empower" the economy directly, but works through the mediation of institutions (the normative tier). Conversely, the Suzhou case library and the urban indicator system can become a field of empirical testing for the three-tier structure theory. This is a viable passage from "grand narrative" to "testable mechanism."

1. Bring the finance proposition into the humanistic-economy agenda. Push the discussion of "what kind of capital arrangements the high-quality development of the humanistic economy requires": direct financing for cultural enterprises and the assetization of copyright; the entry of inclusive finance into cultural-industry parks; the design of regulation that prevents capital from alienating culture into an object of speculation. This both fills a blank in humanistic economics and submits Zhang Keliang's financial propositions to the test of the mainstream policy context. Concretely, one might consider establishing the "financial governance of the humanistic economy" as a second-level topic, with the agenda set jointly by the humanistic economics camp led by Hong Yinxing and the Cultural and Political Economics camp led by Zhang Keliang, and advanced in stages.

1. Build a shared platform for dialogue and a scholarly community. Zhang Keliang's theory should actively enter the Humanistic Economy Suzhou Forum, the autonomous knowledge system construction alliance and the relevant journal columns, and submit itself to mainstream criticism; scholars of the humanistic economy, for their part, should confront squarely the absence of the financial-institutional dimension and absorb the resources of civilizational theory. Only mutual entry can simultaneously relieve the former's "crisis of reception" and the latter's "crisis of doctrinal rigor."

1. It is proposed that the author complete three tasks of doctrinal work: first, to engage head-on with Kwang-chih Chang's "continuity and rupture," with international cultural economics and with the Western CPE literature, and to state clearly where his theory converges with and diverges from them; second, to operationalize strong propositions such as "finance = relations of production," distinguishing definitional propositions, empirical hypotheses and policy norms; third, to stabilize the naming of the theory (with "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name and "Civilization Structure Theory" as the concept of the internal unit of analysis), so as to avoid the cognitive cost of using several names at once.

1. Establish a comparable diagnostic framework on the docking benchmark of "finance = relations of production." The real point of dialogue between the two theories lies not in analogizing concepts but in whether they can offer comparable diagnoses of the same financial issue. Take, for example, "the capitalization of China's cultural industries": humanistic economics can offer the diagnosis of "investing in people + guarding against excessive commercialization," while Cultural and Political Economics can offer the diagnosis of "financial structure determines cultural distribution + capital policy as the third instrument of macro-control." Putting the two side by side and testing them allows the explanatory power of the two theories to be measured against one another within the same empirical field — a viable path from "mutual learning" to "joint verification."

1. Use the three-tier value structure as the interface to build a two-way translation dictionary. The core concepts of humanistic economics (humanistic human capital, humanistic government governance, humanistic entrepreneurial spirit, humanistic institutional rules) can be mapped one by one onto the three tiers of Cultural and Political Economics: humanistic human capital ≈ ideal value + utilitarian value; humanistic government governance ≈ normative value; humanistic entrepreneurial spirit ≈ ideal value (transcendent motivation) + utilitarian value (market capacity); humanistic institutional rules ≈ normative value. In this way the two sets of discourse can translate into one another without abandoning their own logics, and "each talking to himself" is avoided.

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VI. Conclusion

Chinese modernization needs "an economics with the humanistic in it," and it also needs "a political economy with a view of civilization." Humanistic economics answers the question "how is it that cultural flourishing goes together with economic leadership" (the why and the how); Cultural and Political Economics answers the question "what kind of civilizational structure sustains this going-together, and what kind of financial arrangement will dissolve it" (the deep mechanism and the institutional premise). The two are the same theme in different structures, upper and lower in mutual echo, surface and interior in mutual need: one supplies the policy interface and the empirical soil, the other supplies civilizational depth and institutional critique. If they can be docked within the general framework of the "two combinations," humanistic economics may be spared shallowness by acquiring a civilizational foundation, and Cultural and Political Economics may be spared isolation by acquiring mainstream testing — and this is perhaps the most valuable conclusion this comparative study can offer to both sides.

Looking a step further, the question that the two can truly answer together, and that neither can answer alone, is this: in the course of Chinese modernization, how are humanistic values to acquire a material vehicle through the institutional arrangements of finance? Humanistic economics is good at answering "how values empower the economy"; Cultural and Political Economics is good at answering "how the financial system carries values." Together they can fill the core blank in the triad of "value — institution — finance." This is perhaps the most promising direction this comparative study can point to for the future of Chinese scholarship.

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Appendix: Sources and Notes

(1) The Zhang Keliang theory section (based on the author's books; no internet-mediated hearsay relied upon)

• How the New Third Board Is Changing China, by Zhang Keliang, Economic Science Press, November 2017 (including the closing section of Chapter 5, "Cultural and Political Economics: A New Theoretical Framework").
• Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise — The Return and Transcendence of Chinese Civilization, by Zhang Keliang and Huang Xiaoting, Guangming Daily Press, January 2025 (inner volume, "The Reconstruction of Civilization," plus outer volume, "The Rise of Finance"; according to the author the manuscript was completed in 2021).
• Zhang Keliang, "Civilization Structure Theory: A Three-Dimensional Paradigm of Social Analysis Integrating Culture, Politics and Economy" (14 July 2026; the author's own theoretical statement, published on the "Cultural and Political Economics" WeChat account).
• Zhang Keliang, internal decision on the return to the original name (10 September 2026; establishing "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name and "Civilization Structure Theory" as the concept of the internal unit of analysis).
• Zhang Keliang, Capital, Finance and the State ("the gushing spring," a monograph on socialist financial theory; the intensive edition of September 2026, nine chapters plus a reader's guide and a conclusion) — the systematic reconstruction of the financial propositions "posed as problems" in the outer volume of the earlier book; by the author's instruction, "wherever content touching the financial field is concerned, this book is authoritative."
• Cultural and Political Economics: Mastery Notes on the Theoretical System (September 2026 edition, "the two books brought into full coherence") — integrating the two manuscripts, including the three internal relations (subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function), the three original contributions, instruments A–H, ten types of application scenarios, and so on.
• Internal compilation: Cultural and Political Economics: Mastery Notes on the Theoretical System (compiled from a close reading of the whole of Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise).

(2) The humanistic economics section (literature published between 2023 and 2026)

• Chinese government website: "Always Keeping the Role of the Tide-Rider" — a sidelight on Xi Jinping's attendance at the deliberation of the Jiangsu delegation (March 2025); "'Promoting an Effective Improvement in the Quality and a Reasonable Growth in the Quantity of the Economy'" (December 2023); "Ascending High, the View Between Heaven and Earth Expands" (January 2024).
• Xinhua News Agency: summary of the release of and seminar on the think-tank report The Humanistic Economics of the New Era (3 December 2023, the Fifth World Media Summit).
• People's Daily Online, theory channel: "The Development of Humanistic Economics Helps Realize Chinese Modernization" (February 2025); "'How Should We Do Research on Humanistic Economics Well'" (October 2025, interviews with Li Xiangmin, Hu Yu and Gao Debu).
• Hong Yinxing: "The Humanistic Economics of the Mutual Promotion and Joint Prosperity of the Humanistic and the Economy," Journal of Nanjing University (Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences), 2025, no. 1; Humanistic Economics: Connotation of the Era and Practical Samples (editor, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, launched May 2026).
• Nanjing University news website: "The Release of The Humanistic Economics of the Suzhou Miracle and The Suzhou Humanistic Economics Typical Case Library" (28 February 2025); Hong Yinxing's series of articles on humanistic economics.
• Chinese Social Sciences website: summary of the 2026 Humanistic Economy Suzhou Forum (January 2026); report on the humanistic economics sub-forum of the 2026 Forum on Building a Strong Socialist Culture (May 2026); summary of the "Philosophy Night Talk: Humanistic Economics and Suzhou" seminar (November 2024).
• Luo Weidong: "The Direction of Construction and the Practical Path of Humanistic Economics" (August 2025, reproduced by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences).
• Jiangsu Provincial Federation of Social Sciences: "Academic Symposium on Constructing China's Autonomous Knowledge System of Humanistic Economics" (May 2026); Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee news website, sidelight on the humanistic economics sub-forum of the 2026 Forum on Building a Strong Socialist Culture (May 2026).
• People's Forum website: "The Direction Choices for Deepening Research on the Humanistic Economics of the New Era" (February 2025).
• Reports on the launch and expansion of the "China Humanistic Economics Autonomous Knowledge System Construction Alliance" (launched January 2026, expanded to more than 30 institutions by July 2026); progress in the construction of the Jiangsu Academy of Humanistic Economics (jointly built by the Provincial Party Committee's Publicity Department, the Suzhou Municipal Party Committee and Soochow University) (May 2026).

(3) Basis of the review

• Review opinion on the comprehensive assessment of the paradigm of Zhang Keliang's Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) (8 September 2026; in this working directory): this paper adopts that review's N1–N6 logical nodes, five structural gaps and twelve improvement suggestions as a reference for revision, but does not treat it as criticism of Zhang Keliang himself; rather it is regarded as "a doctrinal checklist from an internal perspective."

(4) Note: this report is an independent academic comparison, and its standpoint strives to be objective; the value judgments and criticisms directed at both theories are matters of doctrinal discussion. The statements of leaders quoted in the text are cited according to the original texts of officially published reports.