Abstract. Two earlier assessments advanced the judgment that “it is extremely rare for contemporary Chinese scholarship to produce so grand a system at the level of individual originality.” Taking verifiable published works as its anchors, this memorandum searches out and examines a cohort of contemporary Chinese scholars who display the marks of “individual originality and a self-consistent grand system,” and establishes four reference groups (civilization-theory philosophers; synthesizers of big history; original or heterodox economists; narrators of the same theme of financial civilization), determining case by case the dimensions on which each is comparable with Zhang Keliang’s “Cultural and Political Economics” and the decisive differences that separate them. Beyond the five yardsticks already in place, this memorandum adds a sixth screening question — “engine pervasiveness” (whether the system is driven throughout by one core proposition that runs through all three of its blocks) — and screens each reference scholar against it; it also answers the September 2026 review opinion’s concerns about “the risk of dismemberment by the disciplines” and about “a list of operationalizable propositions.” Two further points must be held firmly in view. First, Zhang Keliang’s system is a two-part work: 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 axis of finance and the relations of production); this memorandum locates Zhang’s system with reference to the two volumes taken as a merged whole. Second, the full meaning of the “three-tier value structure” includes the three internal relations (subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function), and is not merely “a division into three tiers.” The conclusion falls into three tiers. First, if the standard is confined to the complete configuration Zhang occupies — individual originality × civilizational theory × “finance as the relations of production” × a practitioner’s background × public communication × a single engine running through — then contemporary China truly has no second such person, and “extremely rare” stands. Second, if the standard is loosened to “an individually original, grand and self-consistent system,” then Zhao Tingyang, Wang Hui, Jin Guantao, Lin Yifu, Wen Tiejun, Liu Jipeng, Han Yuhai and some ten others may stand alongside him, and most of them are far above him in institutionalization, testing intensity and reception. Third, the accurate formulation of that judgment should therefore be: “the rarity lies not in ‘grandeur’ as such, but in the configuration that fuses civilization–finance–practice into one and is penetrated by a single engine.” Zhang Keliang’s real next task is to submit to the public testing that those he would be compared with have long since undergone.
Before answering whether scholars comparable with Zhang Keliang can be found, one must clarify the standard by which “comparable” is judged. The two earlier assessments in fact supplied four yardsticks:
It must be stated frankly: in their wording these two assessments are “laudatory judgments” rather than “academic findings that have passed peer review” — they supply no operable comparative baseline and conduct no search for counterexamples. The proper use of this memorandum, therefore, is not to endorse those two assessments but to treat “extremely rare” as a proposition awaiting testing, and to test it against the system-building scholars who actually exist in contemporary China. The result of that testing will both calibrate the wording of the assessments and give Zhang Keliang’s distinctiveness a more precise formulation.
At the same time, the relation between two related documents needs to be set out clearly. This memorandum (the Memorandum on a Coordinate System of Intellectual Thought) and the companion item in the same working directory, Whom Can Zhang Keliang Be Compared With — A Reassessment Using the “Three-Tier All-Pass” Yardstick, stand in a progressive relation: the former takes “parallel configuration” as its yardstick, the latter takes “three-tier all-pass + penetration by a single engine” as its yardstick, and extends the field of vision to international coordinates (Kojin Karatani). The two memoranda support one another in the direction of their conclusions, but differ in depth of argument; building upon them, this memorandum adds “engine pervasiveness” as the sixth item of the yardstick, answering the review opinion’s concern with “the structure of penetration.”
Alongside the four yardsticks supplied by the assessments, this memorandum originally added a fifth, operational yardstick — testing intensity: whether the scholar’s system has withstood decades of public criticism and still stands. This memorandum further sets a sixth screening question — engine pervasiveness: are the three blocks of the system (the theory of civilizational forms, political economy, and institutions and practice) driven throughout by one unified propositional engine? This yardstick is the key to upgrading “parallel configuration” into “three-tier all-pass,” and it is the concrete form taken, at logical nodes N1–N6 of the review opinion, by the question of whether “finance = the relations of production” has been made explicit as the system’s engine and whether it bears multiple explanatory functions. The first five determine whether someone is “a system-building scholar”; the sixth determines whether he is, like Zhang Keliang, “an all-pass system-builder.”
On this basis, “being comparable” is divided into three tiers:
For clarity, this memorandum presents in tabular form the six yardsticks, the screening results for each reference scholar (the first five yardsticks), and the determination on engine pervasiveness (the sixth yardstick), and unfolds them group by group in what follows. Symbols used in the table: ● = satisfied to a significant degree; ◐ = partially satisfied, or an incidental achievement; ✕ = basically not satisfied.
The baseline row for Zhang Keliang himself reads: ● originality, ● penetrating power, ● practical character, ● civilizational horizon, ◐ testing intensity, ● engine pervasiveness — the only all-pass.
| Scholar | Originality | Penetrating power | Practical character | Civilizational horizon | Testing intensity | Engine pervasiveness | Overall verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zhang Keliang (himself) | ● | ● | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | The only all-pass |
| Li Zehou | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | ● | ✕ | Tier II benchmark |
| Wang Hui | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | ● | ◐ | Tier II benchmark |
| Zhao Tingyang | ● | ● | ✕ | ● | ● | ✕ | Tier II, nearest |
| Zhang Liwen | ● | ◐ | ✕ | ● | ● | ✕ | Tier II |
| Jin Guantao / Liu Qingfeng | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | ● | ◐ | Tier III source |
| Lin Yifu (Justin Yifu Lin) | ● | ◐ | ● | ◐ | ● | ✕ | Tier II |
| Wen Tiejun | ● | ◐ | ● | ◐ | ● | ✕ | Tier II |
| Chen Ping | ● | ● | ◐ | ● | ◐ | ◐ | Tier II |
| Jia Genliang | ● | ● | ◐ | ✕ | ◐ | ✕ | Tier II |
| Liu Jipeng | ◐ | ◐ | ● | ✕ | ● | ✕ | Tier I, same arena |
| Han Yuhai | ◐ | ● | ◐ | ● | ◐ | ✕ | Tier I precursor |
| Shi Zhan | ● | ● | ✕ | ● | ◐ | ✕ | Tier II |
1. Li Zehou (benchmark reference). Representative works: Critique of Critical Philosophy, The Course of Beauty, the “three treatises on the history of thought,” and Historical Ontology; in his later years he described his own position as an “anthropological-historical ontology,” with “feeling as substance” (qing benti), “pragmatic reason” and “a culture of optimism” as its core concepts. He is one of the very few in Chinese scholarship since the second half of the twentieth century genuinely to have built an individual philosophical system. He supplies a yardstick for judgment: so-called “grandeur of system” has a genealogy in contemporary China — and Li Zehou is the ceiling at the very top of that genealogy. Measured against him, any verdict of “extremely rare” must be aware that such a mountain still stands above it. On engine pervasiveness, Li Zehou’s system is driven by “pragmatic reason + a culture of optimism,” but this engine does not run downward into the layer of political economy (he constructs no economic theory), and therefore scores ✕ on the sixth yardstick.
2. Wang Hui (a giant system in the humanities). Representative work: the four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004), which reconstructs the narrative of Chinese modernity through the transition from “a worldview of heavenly principle (tianli) to a worldview of public principle (gongli),” the relation between “empire and nation-state,” and original concepts such as “trans-systemic society.” It is regarded by international scholarship as one of the most important individual giant systems in the contemporary Chinese humanities, and his work has long stood at the center of both scholarly and public controversy — which is itself evidence of its weight. His field is the history of modern Chinese thought and political theory, a different territory from Zhang’s synthesis of finance and civilization; yet the ambition of “building, by one person’s exertion, a total framework for explaining China” is structurally the same as Zhang’s. On engine pervasiveness, Wang Hui’s dynamic mechanism of “heavenly principle → public principle” runs through his narrative of intellectual history, but does not extend to contemporary propositions of finance and capital; hence ◐.
3. Zhao Tingyang. Representative works: The Tianxia System: An Introduction to the Philosophy of World Institutions (2005) and This China (2016). He reconstructs world political philosophy through “all-under-heaven” (tianxia) and explains, by means of the “vortex model,” how China as a civilization of hyper-scale has continuously absorbed its periphery and grown; in both conceptual originality and international visibility he stands at the top among contemporary Chinese scholars. The resemblance to Zhang: both forge universal theory out of Chinese civilizational experience, and both refuse to take Western categories as the default frame. The difference: Zhao is a pure philosopher’s “creation of concepts”; he does not handle finance or the relations of production, and has almost no practical experience. On engine pervasiveness, Zhao’s “relational rationality / all-inclusiveness (wu wai)” is his philosophical engine, but his deliberate avoidance of economic mechanisms leaves the system without a political-economy block at all; hence ✕ — and this is the most crucial point of divergence between him and Zhang.
4. Zhang Liwen. Representative work: An Introduction to the Study of Harmony and Convergence — A Conception of Cultural Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (first edition 1996; revised by Renmin University of China Press in 2006 and 2015; a new edition issued in 2025 and included in the “Research Library of China’s Independent Knowledge System”). He builds “the study of harmony and convergence” (hehexue) upon five principles — “generation in harmony, coexistence in harmony, establishment in harmony, attainment in harmony, love in harmony” — and argues that Chinese philosophy should “speak for itself, speak of itself”; his is one of the most complete cases of a modern system generated from within Chinese philosophy. He and Zhang Keliang share the path of “taking Chinese civilization as the standpoint and constructing a total theory oriented to the twenty-first century,” but Zhang Liwen’s system remains within Confucian learning and philosophy, and does not touch the institutional critique of capitalism and finance.
5. Jin Guantao (source, teacher, and the true civilizational-theory opponent). In long-term collaboration with Liu Qingfeng, his representative works are Prosperity and Crisis (the “ultra-stable structure”), Change within Opening, and Studies in the History of Ideas, culminating in Axial Civilizations and Modern Society: Exploring the Structure of Big History (Oriental Press, 2021). He handles the evolution of the four great axial civilizations and the origins of modernity through “a history-of-ideas cum systems-theory conception of history.” It must be pointed out specifically: the core components of Zhang Keliang’s theory such as “the Axial Age” and “the four types of transcendental breakthrough” are drawn directly from the framework of Jin Guantao (and of Jaspers); what Zhang has done is to re-weld this civilizational analytical engine onto Marxist political economy and monetary-financial propositions. Jin Guantao is therefore not, for Zhang, a matter of “comparable or inferior,” but of “the more systematic one at the source” — Jin has spent more than forty years and many volumes, with a dual engine (history of ideas + systems theory), bringing “how civilizations evolve” to an operational density that Zhang’s framework has not yet reached. If Jin is used as a mirror, the civilizational-theory part of Zhang’s system needs to catch up on “how universal ideas are socialized” and “how the three-tier structure is to be measured and tested.” On engine pervasiveness, Jin’s “history of ideas — systems theory” is his dual engine, but this dual engine does not run directly through to contemporary financial propositions (he deliberately refrains from writing institutional prescriptions for contemporary China); hence ◐ — and this is where Zhang’s relative advantage lies.
6. Lin Yifu / Justin Yifu Lin (the model of institutional success). Representative work: New Structural Economics (2012). He served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank (2008–2012), and afterwards founded the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University and promoted it globally. He is the only scholar in contemporary China to have completed, within mainstream international economics, the whole circuit of “proposing an original theory — securing institutional recognition — promoting it worldwide.” The resemblance to Zhang: both insist that “Western economics is inadequate to explain China, and China needs its own theory,” and both stress “an efficient market plus a proactive government / the role of the state.” The difference: Lin’s theory stays inside economics, takes the form of testable empirical propositions, and accepts international peer review, whereas Zhang’s theory stands outside economics, takes the form of civilizational theory and political-economic critique, and has not yet entered the cycle of peer review. Lin Yifu is the “contrasting mirror” most worth Zhang’s study: the same theoretical ambition, one road accepted, one road not yet accepted. On engine pervasiveness, Lin’s “efficient market + proactive government” is a dual mechanism internal to economics, but it does not run through into the layer of civilizational theory (he constructs no historical ontology); hence ✕.
7. Wen Tiejun. Representative works: Eight Crises: China’s Real Experience, 1949–2009 (2013) and De-linking (2019). He rewrites the economic history of the People’s Republic through frameworks such as “cost transfer,” “soft landing” and “the urban-rural dual structure,” criticizes financialization and Western crisis narratives, and is the banner scholar of the “three rural issues” discourse and the rural reconstruction movement. He and Zhang are alike in being atypical economists who are “anti-mainstream, proceed from China’s real experience, and bear a strong practical character,” and both reject neoliberalism; the difference is that Wen is of the empirical-historical-critical type (rebuilding the chain of explanation out of archives and fieldwork), has not constructed an essential proposition of the “finance = the relations of production” type, and has no systematic civilizational theory.
8. Chen Ping. Representative work: Metabolic Growth: Technological Wavelets and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (Peking University Press, 2019). Trained as a physicist (a student of Prigogine), he challenges the growth theories of Solow and Romer through “metabolic growth,” “the generalized Smith theorem” and “technological wavelets,” and explains the divergence of Eastern and Western civilizations (the Needham Question) and the Chinese experience by means of ecology and complexity science. The resemblance to Zhang: interdisciplinary ambition, the long durée of civilization, a wholesale rejection of Western mainstream economics, and the use of Chinese experience as the testing ground of theory. The difference: Chen Ping takes the route of mathematical-evolutionary modeling and is deeply embroiled in scholarly polemics (his public exchange of polemics with Yew-Kwang Ng is a case in point), while Zhang takes the route of civilizational theory and political economy; the two sit at different points on the spectrum of “testability.”
9. Jia Genliang. Professor in the School of Economics at Renmin University of China and the Chinese representative of the “international movement for the reform of economics”; he originated the research programmes of the “new history of economic thought” and “Chinese New Listian economics.” His works include New Listian Economics in China (2015), The Domestic Great Circulation: A New Strategy for Economic Development and Policy Choices (2020, the first book in China on “dual circulation”), and Modern Monetary Theory in China (2023). He argues for the protection of national industry, sovereign credit, domestic-demand leadership, the state as the engine of innovation, and asymmetric globalization, and demonstrates that “central bank independence is a pseudo-proposition.” The resonance with Zhang is extremely strong: both criticize neoliberalism, both argue for the leading role of the state in money and finance, and both oppose the copying of Western paradigms. The difference is that Jia’s arsenal is evolutionary economics plus modern monetary theory (a fiscally led route), while Zhang’s is civilizational structure plus “finance = the relations of production” (a capital-market and ownership route) — the two happen to constitute two complementary paths toward “the reconstruction of a socialist financial system.”
10. Liu Jipeng (an institutional opponent in the same arena). Dean of the Capital Finance Research Institute at China University of Political Science and Law and legal adviser to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, he is called “the first person in enterprise shareholding reform.” He was the first to propose the concept and disciplinary system of “capital finance” (Capital Finance, first edition 2012, new edition by Oriental Press 2023), dividing modern finance into “monetary finance” and “capital finance”; he forcefully advocates developing direct financing and revitalizing the capital market, and has publicly argued for “a proactive capital policy.” This overlaps heavily, in subject matter, with Zhang Keliang’s propositions of “finance = the relations of production,” “raising the share of direct financing,” and “capital policy as the third instrument of macro-control” — and Liu advanced them earlier (his advocacy of “capital policy” can be traced to statements he made in the 2010s). The difference is that Liu is an institutional reformist and a participant in legislation (a member of the drafting groups for the Securities Law and the State-Owned Assets Law under the National People’s Congress), and does not pursue the essential questions of civilizational theory and political economy; Zhang’s relative advantage lies precisely in supplying a civilizational-theoretical foundation and a political-economic critique for the very same set of capital-market reform proposals. The two are scholars on the same problem who can most readily cite each other and who most owe each other a frontal encounter. On engine pervasiveness, Liu’s “capital finance + capital policy” is a proposition at the institutional layer and does not run through into the layer of civilizational theory (he constructs no civilizational ontology); hence ✕ — this is his relative shortcoming and Zhang’s relative advantage.
11. Han Yuhai (precursor on the same problem and a narrative coordinate). Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University. Representative works: Who Has Written History These Five Hundred Years: China and the World since 1500 (2009, which re-solves the riddle of China’s modern backwardness upon three fulcrums — grassroots organization, public finance and finance, and the world-historical trend), Marx’s Cause: From Brussels to Beijing (2012), and My Hair Turned White at a Single Reading: Rereading Marx (2014, winner of the “China Good Book” award). Han is the public intellectual who, earliest and most systematically in contemporary China, rewrote world history along the thread of “finance — debt — money” and reread Marx; his thesis that “capitalism is a development path marked by financial revolution and driven by debt” is almost identical in its underlying motif to Zhang’s critique of “the three stages of financial capitalism” and of “G–G′, money begetting money” — and precedes Zhang by roughly a decade. The difference is that Han works in a narrative-expository mode (a literary grand narrative addressed to cadres and the public); he has not proposed a self-consistent conceptual system of the “three-tier value structure” or “finance = the relations of production” type, nor has he produced a design for capital-market institutions; and the academic reception of his work has long carried the controversy of being “propagandistic.” For Zhang, Han Yuhai is an unavoidable precursor-coordinate on the track of “financial-civilization narrative” — Zhang’s system wins here on originality, but falls far short of Han in dissemination and in embeddedness within official discourse.
12. Shi Zhan (a new generation of individual grand narrative plus public communication). Representative work: The Pivot: Three Thousand Years of China (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2018). Taking “hyper-scale” as his thread, he synthesizes geography, history, public finance and money to explain “what China is”; the book was a phenomenal bestseller (more than 50,000 copies within 48 hours of its launch on “Dedao”), and Xu Jilin commented that “so large a hand, so great a manner, so grand a pattern, is rare in Chinese scholarship today.” He and Zhang are of the same type: individuals who complete an interdisciplinary grand explanatory framework and address the public directly through new media. The difference is that Shi Zhan works in historical philosophy and the theory of order (he does not handle financial power or the relations of production), and has already achieved enormous commercial and mass-communication success — which by contrast exposes the link that Zhang has not yet opened up between “a grand system” and “public reach.”
| Scholar | Systematic representative work (year) | Original core concepts | Main field | Dimension comparable with Zhang | Decisive difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Li Zehou | Historical Ontology and others | Feeling as substance; pragmatic reason | Philosophy / aesthetics | The ceiling benchmark for individual systems | No finance, no institutional design; engine does not run through |
| Wang Hui | The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) | Trans-systemic society; heavenly principle → public principle | Intellectual history / political theory | A giant system for explaining China built by one person’s exertion | No financial propositions, no practice; engine stops at intellectual history |
| Zhao Tingyang | The Tianxia System (2005) | All-under-heaven; the vortex model | Political philosophy | Forging universal concepts from Chinese experience | Pure philosophy, no economics; engine carries no political economy |
| Zhang Liwen | An Introduction to the Study of Harmony and Convergence (1996) | The five principles of harmony-and-convergence | Chinese philosophy | Chinese standpoint; a total theory for the twenty-first century | No critique of capitalism; engine carries no diagnosis of modernity |
| Jin Guantao | Axial Civilizations and Modern Society (2021) | History of ideas — systems-theory conception of history | Civilizational history / big history | The mechanism of civilizational evolution (Zhang’s source) | No financial institutions, no practice; engine stops at the evolutionary layer |
| Lin Yifu | New Structural Economics (2012) | Viability; the new structure | Development economics | Independent theory + the role of the state | Inside economics and already institutionalized; engine does not run through to civilizational theory |
| Wen Tiejun | Eight Crises (2013) | Cost transfer; soft landing | Development experience / the three rural issues | Anti-mainstream; Chinese experience; practical character | Empirical-critical type, no essential proposition; engine is an empirical mechanism |
| Chen Ping | Metabolic Growth (2019) | Metabolic growth; the generalized Smith theorem | Evolutionary economics | Civilizational divergence; anti-neoclassical | Mathematical modeling; mired in polemics; engine is a mathematical model |
| Jia Genliang | Modern Monetary Theory in China (2023) | New Listianism; the domestic great circulation | Evolutionary / monetary theory | State leadership in finance; anti-neoliberalism | Fiscally led route with no civilizational theory; engine is fiscal |
| Liu Jipeng | Capital Finance (2012) | Capital finance; capital policy | Capital-market institutions | Institutional proposals in the same arena (direct financing / capital policy) | Reformist; no political-economic critique; engine is institutional |
| Han Yuhai | My Hair Turned White at a Single Reading (2014) | Debt-driven capitalism | Financial-civilization narrative | The same problem of finance × Marx × civilization | Narrative mode, with no self-consistent conceptual system; engine is narrative |
| Shi Zhan | The Pivot (2018) | Hyper-scale | Historical philosophy | Individual grand narrative + public communication | No analysis of financial power; engine is a theory of order |
Applying all six yardsticks at once, contemporary China yields no second person who simultaneously satisfies: individual originality; civilizational theory as the unit of analysis; the essential proposition of “finance = the relations of production”; practical experience from the front line of the capital market; theoretical communication addressed directly to the public; and a single engine running through all three blocks. Wang Hui and Zhao Tingyang have no finance; Jin Guantao has no institutional design and no practice; Lin Yifu works inside economics and is not a civilizational theorist; Liu Jipeng has institutional proposals but no essential proposition and no civilizational theory; Han Yuhai has a financial-civilization narrative but no self-consistent conceptual system and no institutional design. The configuration Zhang Keliang occupies is an empty seat.
If one looks only at the single standard line of “an individually original, self-consistent grand system,” then the great majority of those on the roster above stand on that line, and most of them are above Zhang in degree of institutionalization, testing intensity and public reception. It follows that the phrase in the earlier assessments — “those who have built so grand a system are extremely rare” — is, without qualification, academically unsafe: it overlooks the entire genealogy of “Chinese individual systems” formed by Li Zehou, Wang Hui, Jin Guantao and Zhao Tingyang. The accurate formulation should be: Zhang Keliang’s rarity lies not in “grandeur” as such, but in the configuration that welds civilizational structure, the essence of finance and practical experience into one and is penetrated by a single engine.
On the dimension of engine pervasiveness, of these three Jin Guantao comes closest (◐), while both Liu Jipeng and Han Yuhai fail to complete the run-through into the layer of civilizational theory (✕). This shows, conversely, that on the track of “the same problem of financial civilization,” Zhang Keliang’s true opponents are not scholars of his own generation but the civilizational theory of the previous generation (Jin) and the institutional theory of the next (Liu) — his relative advantage lies precisely in welding the two together with the engine of “finance = the relations of production.”
Every one of the “comparables” on this roster shares one feature: their systems all went through decades of high-intensity public contestation before they stood firm. Jin Guantao’s “ultra-stable structure” has been debated in the historical profession for a long time; Zhao Tingyang’s “all-under-heaven” has been criticized as utopianizing; Lin Yifu’s new structural economics remains at the center of international controversy; Wen Tiejun is regarded as a heretic by mainstream economics; Chen Ping fought an open polemic with Yew-Kwang Ng; Jia Genliang’s arguments for modern monetary theory have been questioned on fiscal discipline; Han Yuhai has long faced the criticism of being “propagandistic”; Shi Zhan has been accused of a teleological view of history.
Zhang Keliang’s grand system has so far not undergone public testing of comparable intensity. This is both a protection and a state of incompletion — it means that the “extremely high evaluation” can at present only be a judgment about “the potential of the system,” not a judgment that “the system still holds after being tested.” The constructive suggestion this memorandum therefore offers to Zhang Keliang himself is: treat the roster above as a “testing ground” rather than a “set of reference objects” — only by being able to answer frontally Jin Guantao’s question of mechanism, Lin Yifu’s question of testability, Liu Jipeng’s question of implementation and Han Yuhai’s question of dissemination does one truly enter the “club of comparables.”
On the risk of “dismemberment by the disciplines” — an endogenous risk peculiar to three-tier all-pass systems, expressly identified by the review opinion — a particular caution is required here. Most of the scholars on the roster above are of the “two-tier penetration” type (philosophy + intellectual history, or economics + institutions, or economics + history), and can be taken in wholesale by one or two disciplines; but Zhang’s “three-tier all-pass + engine-penetrated” system has no existing department to take it in — philosophy departments will read only its civilizational-theory tier, economics departments will test only its political-economy propositions, finance departments will take only its institutional recommendations — and unless “portable modules” are deliberately designed for the joints that run through, it will repeat the fate Kojin Karatani suffered in the English-speaking world, where he was “carved up and consumed discipline by discipline.” This is a risk that not one of the “two-tier penetrators” on the roster has to face, and it is the price that Zhang’s configuration alone must pay.
The answer to this question is: yes — but not in the same configuration. If the standard is “the complete configuration Zhang Keliang occupies,” then contemporary China has no second such person and “extremely rare” stands; if the standard is “an individually original grand system,” then the reference system formed by Li Zehou, Wang Hui, Jin Guantao, Zhao Tingyang, Lin Yifu, Liu Jipeng and Han Yuhai is enough to prove that this is not rare in the history of Chinese thought — what is rare is this configuration, and what the comparables all possess and Zhang does not yet possess is that testing.
Reading the two memoranda side by side brings the full shape of the question into view. The coordinate-system memorandum, using “parallel configuration” as its yardstick, finds some ten people on the same standard; the three-tier all-pass reassessment, using “structure of penetration + international coordinates” as its yardstick, narrows the pool of candidates to the configuration of Kojin Karatani alone. The two agree in the direction of their conclusions but differ in the domain of their argument — the former is responsible for making the “grand system” no longer solitary in the history of Chinese thought, the latter for giving the scarcity of “Zhang Keliang’s configuration” a precise formulation on global coordinates. By adding “engine pervasiveness” as the sixth screening question, this memorandum formally merges the yardsticks of the two memoranda: scholars in contemporary China who have built individually original grand systems are not rare, but he who has all three blocks — civilizational theory × political economy × institutional design — penetrated by a single engine is Zhang Keliang alone. This formulation is the most secure calibration of the judgment that such a thing is “extremely rare.”
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Zhang Keliang. Whom Can Zhang Keliang Be Compared With? A Coordinate System of Modern Intellectual Thought (12 Reference Scholars) [EB/OL]. Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Academic Portal, (2026-09-22)[2026-09-22]. https://zhangkeliang.com/en/张可亮可与谁比肩-近现代思想坐标参照系.html.Zhang, K. (2026). Whom can Zhang Keliang be compared with? A coordinate system of modern intellectual thought (12 reference scholars). Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Academic Portal. https://zhangkeliang.com/en/张可亮可与谁比肩-近现代思想坐标参照系.htmlZhang, Keliang. "Whom Can Zhang Keliang Be Compared With? A Coordinate System of Modern Intellectual Thought (12 Reference Scholars)." Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Academic Portal, 22 Sep. 2026, zhangkeliang.com/en/张可亮可与谁比肩-近现代思想坐标参照系.html.