Abstract: This review takes as its sole basis the texts of Zhang Keliang's original theoretical system (Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise, How the New Third Board Is Changing China, the new book Capital, Finance and the State — "the gushing spring" — the author's self-statements on the system, and the "two books brought into one" mastery notes), offers an independent evaluation along four dimensions (internal logic, system construction, theoretical explanatory power and prospects for development), and puts forward proposals for improvement. Grounded in the author's "two books brought into one" mastery notes, the review firmly grasps three points: (1) the full connotation of the three-tier value structure is "three tiers + three internal relations (subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function)," that is, the upper tier commands and dominates the lower while at once containing and explaining it and delimiting and regulating it, with the three tiers held in a dynamic equilibrium that is at once adaptive and tensile; (2) the reading of Chinese and Western civilization is made precise — the West is not marked by a "rupture among the three tiers" but by "a binary split within ideal value, with the three tiers self-consistent upon the truncated presupposition of the 'rational economic man'," the root of the "cancer of civilization" lying in the split and truncation of the ideal tier; China is not "naturally self-repairing" but "able, through civilizational reconstruction, to enter a new form of civilization" (agency is stressed); (3) Zhang Keliang's system is a two-part whole — Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise (inner volume: the reconstruction of civilization / outer volume: the rise of finance, posed as a problem) plus the new book Capital, Finance and the State ("the gushing spring," the systematic reconstruction of the finance–relations-of-production dimension), introducing a "source-and-flow" relation. The review treats "the full statement and hardening of the three internal relations" as node N8, lists "the correction of the reading of the West" as an independent hardening item, and makes "the jointing of the two books" Gap Eight. The overall verdict is maintained: a heuristic synthetic paradigm — with rare conceptual welding power it joins the theory of civilizational forms, the political economy of finance and socialist institutional design into a single "diagnosis — prescription — transcendence" circuit, and the two-part whole has extended coverage from "the ideal + normative tiers" to "the ideal + normative + utilitarian tiers in full." But as a candidate paradigm in the scientific sense it is still short of three lessons: a "manual of conditions of use" for its strong propositions (logical hardening), cross-national middle-range comparison and historical natural experiments (empirical hardening), and a proposition–data crosswalk with a falsifiability list (test hardening). "The formalization of the three internal relations" and "the portable module for jointing the two books" are critical operations ranking alongside the original P0 items. By agreement the review does not discuss the processes of dissemination, criticism and reception, but it does evaluate "testability and academic dialogue interfaces" as intrinsic qualities of the theory itself. This review opinion is itself refutable.
The object of evaluation is the original theoretical paradigm founded by Zhang Keliang, whose formal name is "Cultural and Political Economics." The unit of analysis of this theory is "civilization" rather than "the economy," and it locates its disciplinary home, by its own designation, in social theory (historical sociology / the sociology of civilization + civilization studies). On the recent evolution of the name: in July 2026 the author briefly adopted "Civilization Structure Theory" as a self-adjusting designation, and in September 2026 returned to the original name "Cultural and Political Economics"; "Civilization Structure Theory" is retained 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), and is no longer used as the formal name of the system. This review uses "Cultural and Political Economics" uniformly throughout as the formal name.
The complete textual basis of the object of evaluation (reconstructed on the "two books brought into one" principle):
资本、金融与国家 - 20260910密集版.md, September 2026 intensive edition, 3,940 lines, 9 chapters + a reader's guide + a conclusion) — a deepening of the outer volume of the earlier book; given that the ideal/normative framework of the earlier book is already fixed, it rebuilds the "utilitarian value" tier (the complete reconstruction of the socialist financial system);The characterization of the relation between the two books (in the author's own words): the new book is "the rebuilding of utilitarian value under the determinations of China's ideal value and normative value" — that is, the earlier book sets direction and builds the skeleton (civilization), the new book builds institutions and fills in the muscle (finance); the earlier book is "the starting point and the road map," the new book is "the cashing out and the deepening." As the user has expressly stipulated: "for any content touching the financial field, the latest manuscript shall govern" — that is, where the propositions touch finance / economy / capital / ownership, the new book "the gushing spring" is authoritative, and the financial chapters of the earlier book serve only as the source of the original "posing of the problem" and as civilizational background. §0.4 (the overall verdict), §3 (explanatory power) and §5 (proposals for improvement) of this review have accordingly taken the new book "the gushing spring" as the prior text.
The basis of this review is confined to the author's own textual system and the mastery notes. The core weapons of the complete framework recorded in the mastery notes are:
The four dimensions adopt the twin tracks of "internal criteria" and "external criteria":
The methodological backstop: in reviewing the author's theory, this review simultaneously applies the methodological principles the author himself professes —
Discipline of wording: wherever a judgment is the reviewer's, the grounds for judging as it does are given as far as possible; wherever something is an inference, it is marked as an inference. The review's conclusions are treated according to the methodology the author himself professes — "sunlight is the best disinfectant" — that is, every criticism in this review is offered in a form in which it can be refuted.
First, this review is an internal textual review, not an evaluation of dissemination effects. By agreement, this review does not discuss such external processes of dissemination as book sales, reader reception, media citation or responses to criticism; it evaluates only the intrinsic qualities of the theory itself (degree of coherence, testability, dialogue interfaces).
Second, this review is a "judgment of potential," not a "judgment of accomplished fact." Any positioning as a "heuristic synthetic paradigm" carries a time-stamp: Kojin Karatani's "configuration of total pass" took nearly half a century of international recognition, from 1969 to 2022, before it was acknowledged; if "still holding after testing" is made the yardstick, then even Karatani has only "undergone testing." Every judgment this review makes about Zhang Keliang implicitly carries this time-stamped character of a "judgment of potential."
Third, the "hard constraint" on this review is the application of the "sunlight philosophy" to itself. The author professes that "public information builds a fault-tolerant mechanism." Every criticism in this review is therefore offered in a form open to refutation, and the author is welcome to respond to or overturn it point by point.
The most accurate description of the present state of this system is "a heuristic synthetic paradigm," rather than an already confirmed empirical theory. Its value is concentrated in its problem-consciousness and in its power of conceptual welding — to be able to measure with a single ruler from five thousand years of civilizational history down to today's financial property rights is a "unifying power" genuinely rare in contemporary Chinese individual theory-production. Three points must be firmly grasped:
Its scientific status, however, is not yet established. What is lacking is not thought, but the operation of translating thought into testable propositions and submitting them to adjudication. A quick view of the four dimensions (adding to the original table two rows, "the jointing of the two books" and "the formalization of the three internal relations"):
| Prospects for development | Conditional optimism (B); the reproduction mechanism of the seventh tier is at the stage of "working procedure planned, substantive launch not yet begun"; the feasibility of moving from two volumes to a unified programme is a new task | The institutional window and the questions of the age are favourable; the risks lie in the single point of failure, absorption into policy discourse and the absence of middle-range evidence; "the gushing spring" makes "the transcendence of finance" a destination proposition that can be examined independently |
| Dimension | Judgment of current state | Core grounds |
|---|---|---|
| Internal logic | High coherence (A−), but the strong propositions lack a "manual of conditions of use"; the clarity of the working definition of the philosophical engine needs improvement; the formalization of the three internal relations (five dimensions) is a new gap | A single engine runs through the three major blocks, leaving little architectural redundancy; several strong equations and strong analogies are not marked for logical type or falsification conditions; the criteria for the five dimensions — subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function — have not yet been formalized |
| System construction | Structure complete but transmission between tiers not formalized (B+); the risk of "dismemberment by the disciplines" remains unresolved; the portable module for jointing the two books is a new gap | The sandwich of civilizational theory — financial theory — institutional theory is in place; what is missing is a transmission chain between tiers, a dictionary of conceptual boundaries and an agenda of cross-national middle-range comparison; the propositions that joint the new book "the gushing spring" to the earlier book have not yet been formalized |
| Theoretical explanatory power | Breadth outstanding, depth and testability to be supplied (breadth A / testability C+); the proposition of the transcendence of finance is a new area of coverage | Exclusive coverage of six types of phenomena; after the two volumes are combined, coverage extends to "the ideal + normative + utilitarian tiers in full"; but most of it is retrospective reinterpretation, while forward-looking propositions and micro-foundations are insufficient |
First, a recursive unifying structure. The most praiseworthy feature of the system is that the engine "finance = relations of production" serves not only the present but also, in reverse, supplies the criterion by which civilizational theory is judged — using the single ruler "who controls the financial system," it explains both the cancerous degeneration of capitalist civilization (Instrument E's stage theory of financial capitalism) and the nature of the contemporary state (the state controlling capital = socialism), and it also writes an institutional prescription (nation–capital integrated mixed ownership). This is not a plate assembled from three separate results, but the recursive unfolding of one and the same proposition. This architecture of "one soul, one main thread" is economical and powerful in logical terms.
Second, the circuit of "diagnosis — prescription — transcendence" is now fully closed in the new book. The earlier book, Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise, supplies the circuit "diagnosis (cancerous degeneration) → prescription (raising direct financing, inclusive finance, nation–capital integration)"; the new book "the gushing spring" adds "transcendence" on top of this — taking "only the transcendence of finance is a thorough transcendence" as the destination proposition, and joining into one complete path for rebuilding the utilitarian-value tier the following: the wave–particle duality of finance (particle state = instrument / wave state = relations) → the gas–liquid–solid phase transition of money (the liquidity cycle) → the three-tier distribution theory (meta-distribution → distribution of use rights → distribution of returns) → Capital Policy "One Body, Two Wings" (a multi-tiered capital market + a stabilization fund + venture capital funds) → nation–capital integrated mixed ownership → "to each worker a share" / the community of free individuals. Once the two volumes are combined, the system possesses for the first time the three-stage circuit of "diagnosis — prescription — transcendence."
Third, several "acts of translation" carry genuine theoretical increment. Translating Marx's matching of "productive forces — relations of production" into the matching of "the real economy — the financial system" in the modern context, translating "economic base — superstructure" into the question of "to whom the financial system belongs," and continuing what Lange called "the second law of sociology" as a financial proposition — these translations are not games of metaphor but offer Marxist political economy an operable direction of rewriting in the face of contemporary financial capitalism.
Fourth, the wave–particle duality of finance is plugged into the engine of "finance = relations of production." The new book "the gushing spring" uses "the wave–particle duality of finance" as the physical counterpart of "finance = relations of production" — the particle being the concrete financial instrument (the dimension of productive forces) and the wave being the financial system as a whole (the dimension of the relations of production). This translation gives the engine proposition the twin support of "a physical analogy + a reading of social relations" all at once: the particle dimension corresponds to an instrumental account of "how the instrument moves," the wave dimension to an ontology of "to whom the instrument belongs and whom it determines." The review acknowledges this as a formalizing upgrade of the earlier engine proposition — raising "finance = relations of production" from a binary equation to a "two-dimensional field theory," so that the engine proposition retains its explanatory power in the face of complex financial phenomena (such as the functional inversion of the same instrument under different institutions).
Fifth, the potential for plugging into the penetrating comparison of "how finance is understood." The comparative research report in the same directory newly introduces "how finance is understood" as the tenth dimension of comparison, calibrating humanistic economics' "finance as instrument" against Cultural and Political Economics' "finance = relations of production." The new book "the gushing spring" further upgrades this penetrating comparison into "wave–particle duality versus the instrumental account" — Cultural and Political Economics' "finance = relations of production + wave–particle duality" is a judgment at a deeper ontological position, giving the engine proposition a sharper outline in the "calibration of contrasts."
The more strong propositions there are, the more necessary it becomes to state each one's "boundaries of application" and "what happens if it is falsified." The reviewer holds the following six nodes to be the places where the system most needs hardening in logical terms.
| N6 | The mapping of "three great leaps × the three tiers of value" | The mapping rule is not explained: why does "standing up" correspond to the normative-value tier rather than the utilitarian tier? If the rule can be flexibly adjusted after the fact, there is a suspicion of circular argument | The mapping is grounded in "the principal shortcoming made good in each period," and is consistent with the sequence of historical tasks (political independence → economic development → the rebuilding of meaning) | Make the grounds of the mapping explicit as a criterion — "the tier supplied by a leap = the bottleneck tier constraining the continuity of civilization in that period" — and acknowledge the existence of spillover across tiers, to guard against after-the-fact selection |
| No. | Logical node | Tension / problem | Defence available to the author | Proposal for hardening |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| N1 | The superimposition of the three-tier value structure upon "economic base / superstructure" | The table sets "utilitarian value = material civilization = economic base / productive forces," but Marx's "economic base" is the sum total of the relations of production, not a "tier of cultural value"; turning the economic base into a matter of value risks sliding into cultural monism, which is in tension with the self-positioning of "culture as an interactive variable" | The three-tier structure is taken from Su Guoxun's stratification of value, and is intended as "correspondence" rather than "identity"; the author expressly rejects pure cultural determinism | State explicitly that the three-tier structure and the Marxist dichotomy stand in a relation of "mapping" rather than "identity," and supply the rules of translation from "tier of value" to "relations of production" (see proposal A2 on the transmission chain between tiers) |
| N2 | The strength of the equals sign in "finance = relations of production" | The proposition is used simultaneously as a definition, as a proposition of essence and as a criterion of judgment; under other forms of the means of production — data, land, labour power — the claim that "funds are the principal form in which the means of production appear" needs qualification; in an age of financialization, funds may also detach from the means of production (G—G′) | The proposition is aimed at "modern society" and is qualified by "the most important form of appearance," leaving logical room; the theory of alienation shows precisely that detachment is pathological | Mark the logical type of the proposition: which are definitional propositions and which are empirical hypotheses; give an operable standard for "the most important" (for instance an indicator of the degree to which financial assets dominate real investment) |
| N3 | "Who controls the financial system = the nature of the state" | Control is not ownership; under state shareholding there exist multi-layer agency, marketized management and mixed property rights, so judging the form of the state by a single attribution is excessively sharp; how is the political standing of the private economy in the "56789" case to be placed? | The author's intent is to oppose the vulgar judgment by "share of GDP" with "the attribution of finance," a direction with real contemporary pertinence | Supply an inventory of "the mechanisms by which control is realized" (personnel, regulation, the pooling of funds, the distribution of returns), and turn the judging sentence into a compound proposition: "if and only if the state holds X, Y and Z" |
| N4 | "Capitalism = the cancer of civilization" | The cancer-cell model carries a strong teleological colour: if cancer necessarily kills its host, how is one to explain the resilience of capitalism over the past century and more in reforming itself (the welfare state, corporate governance, ESG, crisis rescue)? The "necessary death" thesis does not square with empirical history | The author already has a three-stage theory and a theory of cycles (Instrument E), and can reinterpret the cancer as "chronic disease — immune co-evolution," which is compatible with "historical repetition" | Add the concept of "the immune system of capitalism": conceptualize social protection, regulation and the stabilization fund as the immune response of civilization, and change the pathology from "necessarily fatal" to "cyclical deterioration — immune tug-of-war" |
| N5 | "Only Chinese civilization completed the dual transcendent breakthrough" | This is the most ambitious historical assertion in the book and also the weakest in falsifiability: the criteria for "inward" and "outward" and the standard for "completion" have not been formalized; Hebrew civilization handled both individual redemption (inward) and the covenant of the people / the messianic narrative (outward), and Christianity's organizational continuity over two millennia is likewise strong — "only China" has to face counter-examples of this kind | Research on the Axial Age (Jaspers, Jin Guantao, Eisenstadt) itself acknowledges the uniqueness of the Chinese type of breakthrough; the author defines the Chinese type as "the type of will to the good" | Turn "inward / outward" and "degree of completion" into a codable cross-civilizational comparison table (scoring each Axial civilization one by one and publishing the coding rules), turning it from an assertion into a contestable research hypothesis (see proposals B2 and C3) |
The Reassessment by the Three-Tier All-Pass Yardstick in the same directory points out explicitly in its Section 3, "The Global Matrix of Candidates," that the clarity of Marx's working definition of the engine is the highest benchmark that all later comers must chase — "productive forces — relations of production" is used simultaneously in the preface to Capital, the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the Critique of the Gotha Programme as all three of "a definition (in the social production of their lives, human beings enter into definite relations that are necessary and independent of their will)," "an empirical hypothesis (the relations of production must necessarily accord with the state of the productive forces)" and "a revolutionary criterion (revolution means breaking the old relations of production)," and the three senses are never mixed up.
Set against Zhang Keliang's "finance = relations of production":
An upgraded version of the proposal for hardening N7:
| N7: clarity of the working definition of the philosophical engine | "Finance = relations of production" is used with different logical types in different passages, leaving the reader unable to determine "what it is that I am refuting" | Establish "labels of logical type" for the engine proposition in explicit form — mark "here it is a definition / an empirical hypothesis / a policy criterion" with different symbols or tags in the text, and give each type a list of "what happens if it is falsified" | Pre-label the physical counterparts of the three logical types within the framework of wave–particle duality — particle state = definitional proposition (the physical existence of the instrument); wave state = empirical hypothesis (the financial system as the phase relation of the whole); phase transition = policy criterion (the critical point at which the relations are reorganized). The reader can then judge, in any concrete passage, "whether I am refuting the particle-state definition, the wave relation, or the condition of phase transition" |
| Logical node | Tension | Proposal | Upgraded proposal |
|---|
This is the most important addition to the "manual of conditions of use" work of this review.
This node handles the rules governing the use of the three-tier "internal relations." The full formulation of the three-tier value structure is not "the upper tier containing the lower in one direction"; rather, between the three tiers there coexist both the "vertical relation of subordination between higher and lower tiers" and the "dynamic relation of adaptation that is at once fitting and tensile"; the upper tier both contains (embraces, explains) and delimits (regulates, draws boundaries for) the lower — "commanding and dominating" coexists with "containing and delimiting"; and the ideal is the "substance" while the normative and the utilitarian are its "function," so that "the substance does not change, while the function may be renewed." This node covers "subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function" through five sub-nodes, N8.1 to N8.5.
The five concrete tensions of N8:
| N8.5 | The elasticity of substance and function and its limit | "One and the same ideal value can contain different normative and utilitarian values" (socialism can be paired either with the planned economy or with the market economy) — does this mean that the "function" can be replaced without limit? Where is the boundary of "the substance does not change, the function may be renewed"? | The author states explicitly that the three tiers have "relative independence, openness and enormous elasticity," and that this elasticity is precisely the theoretical ground for rebuilding utilitarian value (finance) while the ideal and the normative remain unchanged | Make explicit the criterion of "the substance does not change" — what belongs to the "substance" and may not be shaken (for instance the people-centred character, "all under heaven as one community"), and what belongs to the "function" and may be replaced (for instance concrete financial instruments and forms of realizing ownership) — so as to prevent the "substance" from being quietly substituted |
| No. | Logical node | Tension / problem | Defence available to the author | Proposal for hardening |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| N8.1 | Whether the directionality of subordination is formalized | Subordination is the one-way order in which "the upper tier commands and dominates the lower, and the lower belongs to and obeys the upper"; how is this directionality to be formalized? Does the fact that the lower tier (utilitarian value) changes first and then "pushes" the upper tier to adjust constitute a reverse channel running counter to "subordination"? | The author states explicitly that "the upper tier issues information or instructions to the lower, the lower supplies resources or energy to the upper, and the middle tier acts as intermediary"; the lower's changing first belongs to "the law of change" (the three tiers are not synchronized) and does not negate the order of subordination | Make the directionality explicit as a testable corollary — "if tier A is subordinate to tier B, then independent fluctuation in tier B should not directly rewrite the determinations of tier A, but must pass through the mediation of containment / delimitation by tier A" |
| N8.2 | The mechanism of containment (embracing / explaining) | After the lower tier (utilitarian value) changes first, the upper tier "adjusts accordingly so as to contain or explain the change below" — but how are the threshold that triggers adjustment, the length of the lag and the amplitude to be determined? | The author states explicitly that "utilitarian value changes first with practice → pushing the normative / ideal tiers above to adjust so as to contain / explain the tier below," so the direction of the mechanism is clear | Supply observable proxies for containment — for instance "the average lag before the institutional tier (the normative) recognizes the legality of a new economic form," and "the lag before the ideal tier supplies it with an interpretation of meaning" |
| N8.3 | The boundary of delimitation (regulation / drawing boundaries) | "Ideal value has from its very birth drawn boundaries for normative value and utilitarian value" — but delimitation that is too strong produces rigidity, and too weak produces loss of control ("only delimiting without containing → rigidity; only containing without regulating → loss of control"). How is this degree of "both containing and regulating" to be adjudged? | The author states explicitly that the upper tier exercises the double function of "containment + delimitation" upon the lower, and that the two must coexist; extreme cases are corrected by the feedback of "order and disorder" | Establish a two-dimensional "containment — delimitation" coordinate, mark the position of each historical stage (Emperor Wu of Han, the Song and Ming, New China) upon it, so that imbalance between "containing" and "regulating" becomes identifiable and discussable |
| N8.4 | Adaptation and the threshold of "order and disorder" | "Order" is the unification of the three tiers with enhanced consistency; "disorder" is tension turned into open conflict. How is the critical point between "being fitted to one another" and "open conflict" to be defined? Are China's repeated reconstructions "repairs after containment has failed" or "routine adjustments within the process of adaptation"? | The author states explicitly that the essence of the three tiers is "a dynamic relation of adaptation that is at once fitting and tensile," with order and disorder as the states at the two ends, and that China "re-adapts the relations among the three tiers" through civilizational reconstruction | Operationalize the critical point — for instance taking the simultaneous appearance of "institutional failure (decrees not carried out) + a vacuum of meaning (normative anomie)" as the combined discriminator of "disorder"; and setting "failure to restore adaptation within three generations (roughly 75 years)" as the threshold of "failure," distinguishing it from the routine process in which adaptation can be achieved "within one generation (roughly 25 years)" |
But the group of strong propositions has not yet been furnished with a complete "manual of conditions of use" — and this is the first operation on the road from "good thought" to "hard theory." None of the hardenings from N1 to N8 requires abandoning any core position; all that is needed is to state clearly the boundaries, type and falsification conditions of each proposition. N8 is complete in its five dimensions — subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function — and bears directly upon the contestability of the system's reading of China and the West and of its comparison of Chinese and Western civilization: only if the five dimensions are complete does this pair of readings stand up — "the West = a binary split in the ideal (with containment and delimitation both failing)" and "China = able, through civilizational reconstruction, to enter a new form (in which containment and delimitation adjust alternately)."
The system can be summed up as a "sandwich." The bottom layer is the theory of civilizational forms (the three-tier value structure + the logic of containment among the three tiers, the dual transcendent breakthrough, the diagnosis of cancerous degeneration), which answers the question "how does a civilization endure and how does it become alienated." The middle layer is the political economy of finance (finance = relations of production, the wave–particle duality of finance, the gas–liquid–solid phase transition of money, the three-tier distribution theory, the three-stage theory, the three directions of rebuilding), which answers the question "what determines power and distribution in modern society." The top layer is the history of ideology and institutional design (the correspondence of the three great leaps, nation–capital integrated mixed ownership, the Beijing Stock Exchange as experimental field, Capital Policy "One Body, Two Wings," the stabilization fund, the destination proposition of "the transcendence of finance"), which answers the questions "where are we going" and "how does it land." The three are joined by a single engine — which is at once the most striking structural feature of the system and the location of its structural risk (a single point of failure: if the engine is weakened empirically, both the layer above and the layer below lose their support at once).
The structural upgrade after the two volumes are joined: the earlier book carries propositions at the level of "ideal + normative" (the inner volume, the reconstruction of civilization); the new book "the gushing spring" is the complete rebuilding at the level of "utilitarian value" (the outer volume, the rise of finance) — once the two volumes are combined, every layer of the "sandwich" has complete and coherent content: the bottom layer (civilizational theory), the middle layer (the political economy of finance) and the top layer (institutional design).
| The New Third Board = the water-management system of the capital market / inclusive finance | High (a practical anchor) | High | Medium-high (the author's own front line of practice) | A longitudinal case library; comparison with comparable markets abroad |
| Component | Originality | Coherence | Empirical support | Interface still to be supplied |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The three-tier structure of the cultural value system | Medium (inherited from Su Guoxun, used as the main axis of analysis) | High | Medium (supported by civilizational-historical narrative) | A transmission chain between tiers; operable measures |
| Three-tier value structure + three internal relations | High (the internal relations are inherited from Su Guoxun / Zhang Jun; the author uses them as the main axis of analysis) | Medium (the full formulation has only just been made explicit) | Medium (strong Chinese historical narrative; Western cases need to be supplied) | Formalization of the five dimensions — subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function (node N8); criteria for the West's "binary split in the ideal" and China's "reconstruction as adaptation" |
| The dual transcendent breakthrough | High (the author's own) | High | Low–medium (strong case narrative; lacking coding across civilizations) | Coding for cross-civilizational comparison; handling of counter-examples |
| Capitalism = the cancer of civilization | High (original metaphor) | Medium | Medium (strong correspondence with phenomena; weak boundaries of the mechanism) | Supplementing the mechanism of immunity / co-evolution |
| Finance = relations of production | High (the sharpest proposition in the system) | High | Medium (supported by the Chinese case; lacking cross-national evidence) | Labeling of logical type; cross-national middle-range comparison |
| The wave–particle duality of finance | High (original to "the gushing spring") | Medium (newly proposed) | Low (rich in physical analogy; lacking social-scientific testing) | Observable indicators corresponding to the particle state and the wave state; falsification conditions |
| The gas–liquid–solid phase transition of money | Medium-high (physical analogy + local adaptation) | Medium | Medium (rich liquidity indicators; threshold point not quantified) | Operationalization of the critical point of phase transition; correspondence with threshold regression testing (strengthening of B3) |
| The three-tier distribution theory | High (original to "the gushing spring") | Medium (newly proposed) | Low (strongly theoretical; empirical data need to be supplied) | Observable proxies for the three tiers of distribution; criteria for the boundary between the government's "playing its role better" and the market's "decisive role" |
| The three-stage theory of financial capitalism | Medium-high (converging with the left-wing literature on financialization, with local adaptation) | High | High (the spectrum of phenomena since the 1970s) | A translation of the dialogue with the international literature on "financialization" |
| Three great leaps × the three tiers, corresponded | High (an original mapping) | Medium | Medium | Making the criteria of the mapping explicit |
| Capital policy | High (original to "the gushing spring"; a third instrument of macro-control alongside monetary and fiscal policy) | High | Medium (part of the policy formulation has already entered official discourse) | An operable toolkit for capital policy; the boundaries and triggering conditions for coordinating the three policies |
| The stabilization fund | High (original to "the gushing spring"; the central bank taking the subordinated tranche with funds raised targeted from society and from low-income households) | High | Low (a theoretical calculation reducing M2/GDP from 243% to 121%) | Design of pilot schemes; operationalization of the regulation of liquidity "temperature" (B3) |
| Capital Policy "One Body, Two Wings" | High (a multi-tiered capital market + a stabilization fund + venture capital funds) | High | Medium (the multi-tiered capital market is already a fact; the stabilization fund and venture capital funds await implementation) | The priority and staged path of coordinating the three |
| The multi-tiered capital market = a water-management system | Medium-high (the water-management metaphor localized) | Medium | Medium-high (the actual structure of the Shanghai and Shenzhen main boards + the Beijing Stock Exchange + the fourth board) | An indicator of "connectivity of the water system"; an indicator of "irrigation efficiency" (strengthening of E1) |
| Nation–capital integrated mixed ownership | High (an institutional original) | Medium | Low (still a conception; little evidence from trials) | Feasibility studies; pilot design |
| The reconstruction of the entrepreneur's identity | High (original to "the gushing spring": from "the personification of capital" → "a creator of value" / from "a private owner" → "a trustee") | Medium | Low (a newly raised theoretical point) | Dialogue with the literature on entrepreneurship; typical cases |
| "To each worker a share" / the community of free individuals | High (the destination proposition original to "the gushing spring") | Medium | Low | Micro-level realization mechanisms; equity design and governance structure for human capital entering as shares |
| "Only the transcendence of finance is a thorough transcendence" | High (the destination proposition of "the gushing spring" as a whole: the fivefold transcendence from "the logic of capital" to "the logic of the people") | Medium | Low | The concrete content of the fivefold transcendence; operationalization of how "transcendence" is judged |
Gap One: the mechanism of transmission between tiers has not been formalized. Civilizational theory and financial theory currently stand in a relation of "echoing above and below," but the intermediate mechanism chain is missing: how does ideal value pass through normative value (institutions and ideology) to be transmitted into the financial system and thereby determine distribution? If the link in the middle is missing, critics will read civilizational theory as "a narrative background suspended above financial theory." It is proposed that the transmission chain be made explicit (see proposal A2 in detail); this is the key to moving the system from "all-pass" to "testably passable."
Gap Two: the boundaries of the concept family are not systematically managed. New concepts such as "capital policy," "capital parity," "the first distribution of finance," "patient capital" and "maternal-right distribution" share vocabulary with existing policy discourse; if each is not given a discriminating analysis against mainstream concepts (capital policy versus industrial policy / monetary policy; the first distribution of finance versus primary distribution; capital parity versus capital neutrality / competitive neutrality), the system will be consumed by terminological confusion before anything else when it enters the network of citation.
Gap Three: the empirical anchor is single, and cross-national middle-range comparison is missing. Empirical evidence is currently highly concentrated in the single deep case of the New Third Board / Beijing Stock Exchange plus civilizational-historical narrative. The most powerful form of evidence supporting the core proposition "financial structure → the nature of the state and the pattern of distribution" would be cross-national middle-range comparison (what patterns of growth and distribution correspond respectively to universal-banking, main-bank and market-dominated financial systems) and historical natural experiments (a periodization of China's own financial system). Without these two kinds of evidence, the sharpest propositions remain at the level of "a profound reinterpretation of Chinese experience."
Gap Four: no list of propositions and forward-looking corollaries. What the system offers are judgments of direction rather than a list of corollaries of the form "if …, then one ought to observe …." Without a list of corollaries, one cannot distinguish between "the theory being confirmed" and "the theory being used to restate what is already known."
Gap Five: the relation to neighbouring autonomous knowledge systems has not been systematized. The author has drawn boundaries against "humanistic economics" and against Western CPE, but the system still lacks a systematic "record of dialogues": agreements and differences with humanistic economics (the builder of the normative + utilitarian tiers), with Jin Guantao's research on Axial civilizations (an interlocutor on the same mechanism), with Eisenstadt's school of civilizational analysis (the true point of contact with international scholarship), with Liu Jipeng's capital finance (an institutional fellow traveller), and with the international literature on "financialization" (Krippner and others) should each be written up as a separate paper, serving as the system's "documentation of external interfaces."
Gap Six: the structural risk of being dismembered by the disciplines. Section 6 of the Reassessment by the Three-Tier All-Pass Yardstick in the same directory states plainly: "A system of 'civilizational theory + political economy + institutional history' has no ready-made department to take it in: the philosophy department reads only its civilizational-theoretical tier, the economics department tests only its political-economy propositions, the finance department takes only its institutional recommendations — each carries off one layer, and the system as a whole disappears instead. This is precisely what Karatani encountered in the English-speaking world." This risk applies equally to Zhang Keliang's system.
Gap Seven: the gap in stating and hardening the three-tier "internal relations." The author's notes of 2026-09-10, "bringing the two books into one," make clear that the full connotation of the three-tier value structure is "three tiers + three internal relations (subordination + containment + delimitation + adaptation + substance-function)" — this formulation establishes the "internal relations" as an independent main axis of analysis. But the correction adds at the same time a hardening gap: the directionality, triggering thresholds, critical criteria and limits of substance and function in the five dimensions of the "internal relations" (N8.1–N8.5) have not been formalized in the text. If this gap is not hardened within three years, the "internal relations" will be misread by the network of citation as "a theory of Chinese exceptionalism" or "a Confucian-centred theory" — a semantic risk symmetrical to the "risk of being dismembered by the disciplines."
Gap Eight: the gap of jointing the two books. The earlier book, Civilizational Reconstruction and Financial Rise, supplies "the inner volume (ideal + normative) + the outer volume (finance posed as a problem)," and the new book "the gushing spring" is the deepening of the outer volume (the complete rebuilding of the utilitarian-value tier). The two books are strung together by the engine "finance = relations of production" into one line running from "the skeleton of civilization" to "the muscle of finance," but three concrete sub-gaps appear at the joint:
This review proposes that Gaps Seven and Eight be treated as two newly added operations, ranking alongside the original improvement proposals P0–P2 — together with "transmission between tiers not formalized (Gap One)" and "the risk of being dismembered by the disciplines (Gap Six)," they constitute "the four-dimensional gap of a three-tier all-pass system."
The author's operation of correcting the unit of analysis from "the economy" to "civilization" and adjusting the disciplinary home from economics to sociology (historical sociology / the sociology of civilization + civilization studies) is a self-conscious move that deserves approval. Under the most recent formulation of September 2026, the author has clearly returned to "Cultural and Political Economics" as the formal name, with "Civilization Structure Theory" retained within the system as the concept of the internal unit of analysis (the three-tier value structure). Three follow-up proposals are correspondingly updated: first, make explicit in the text the stable two-level usage, "Cultural and Political Economics (taking the three-tier value structure + the three internal relations as its internal unit of analysis)"; second, now that the older name is no longer used as the formal name, it is proposed that the title page or preface of a new edition state the evolution of the naming explicitly; third, this review uses "Cultural and Political Economics" uniformly throughout as the formal name. Fourth, the textual evidence for the claim that "the disciplinary home is sociology + civilization studies (not economics, not a single discipline)" should be made explicit — the author himself cites Lange, calling "the productive forces determine the relations of production" and "the economic base determines the superstructure" straightforwardly "the first and second laws of sociology," and this is the textual ground for saying that "Cultural and Political Economics is in the last analysis sociology."
Fifth, the new book "the gushing spring" should make explicit on its title page that "this book is a deepening of the outer volume of the earlier book (the rise of finance) — that is, the complete rebuilding of the utilitarian-value tier," so that readers understand the hierarchical relation between the two volumes (the earlier book sets direction and builds the skeleton, the new book builds institutions and fills in the muscle); sixth, as the living part of the main axis of analysis, "the three internal relations (subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function)" should be given a special chapter in a new edition of the new book, defining their five-dimensional criteria in the strictest form (in response to node N8); seventh, it is proposed that the source-and-flow labeling — "the earlier book 'posed the problem,' the new book 'systematized'" — be made explicit in the text, so that readers of either book can find the interface into the other.
The reviewer holds the following phenomena to be the genuinely "exclusive or near-exclusive" explanatory coverage of this system, something competing theories can hardly replace:
One item should be added: "the feasibility of penetrating connection" — the comparative research report in the same directory points out explicitly in its section (VII), "How finance is understood," that the difference at the level of financial ontology between Cultural and Political Economics and China's mainstream "humanistic economics" is the former's scarcest achievement of "penetrating comparison."
Beyond these seven items, "the three-stage circuit of 'diagnosis — prescription — transcendence' once the two volumes are combined" should be added:
First, the leap of scale. To jump directly from a civilizational structure of five thousand years to the institutional choices of the Beijing Stock Exchange means an extremely long causal chain; lacking a transmission chain between tiers, the system's explanation appears "open at both ends and suspended in the middle," and is easily criticized as "explaining everything is the same as explaining nothing."
Second, competing explanations are not handled head-on. The establishment of the Beijing Stock Exchange, the rising share of direct financing and the advance of inclusive finance all have explanations within mainstream finance (falling institutional costs, improved information environment, changing investor composition). If the system does not explain one by one "what my explanation adds beyond theirs," the increment will be diluted into "restating the same process in a grander vocabulary."
Third, it is chiefly retrospective, and insufficiently prospective. Most of the system's explanations are "more systematic restatements of already known phenomena" (financialization, bull markets short and bear markets long, the absence of inclusive finance are all already observed phenomena); the genuine "theoretical prediction of new facts" (novel facts) has not yet appeared. This is the watershed in Lakatos's sense between a "progressive" and a "degenerating" research programme.
Fourth, the micro-foundation is weak. Between the civilizational tier and the institutional tier, the system lacks a behavioural theory of "the human person": why individuals speculate, why investors chase rises and sell falls, how institutional trust is formed — all are covered by macro-narrative, and there are no micro-level propositions capable of connecting with the literature on behavioural finance and institutional trust.
Fifth, alignment within the external coordinate system remains to be completed. The Memorandum on the Reference System of Intellectual Coordinates in the same directory takes "the penetrative quality of the engine" as its sixth sieve, screening reference scholars down from the layer of "individuals' original grand systems" (12 persons in all) to the layer of "three-tier all-pass + penetration by a single engine" (1 person in all — Kojin Karatani).
Sixth, the joining of explanatory power between the two volumes remains to be completed. The explanatory power of the earlier book concentrates in "a profound reinterpretation of Chinese experience"; that of the new book concentrates in "the path of transcending the financial system." The explanatory power at the joint — "how the transcendence of finance becomes the concrete realization of the transcendence of civilization" — has not yet been made explicit. This weakness at the joint will cause "the transcendence of finance" to be misread as "an upgrading of financial technique" rather than as "the contemporary form of the transcendence of civilization."
Seventh, the "reading-correction" function of the "three internal relations" has not been fully deployed. The complete framework of "subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function" gives the system a distinctive capacity — that of rewriting the traditional binary discourse of "Chinese exceptionalism" / "Western universalism" into contestable propositions. But this capacity has not yet been fully deployed in the text — especially as between the old formulation, "the thesis of a rupture among the three tiers in the West," and the corrected formulation, "the thesis of a binary split within ideal value in the West," a more explicit "manual of reading-correction" is needed (explaining why the former is a misjudgment and the latter the author's true intent).
Measured by Lakatos's standard of a "research programme," the system at present possesses the rudiments of a progressive programme — it has a unified hard core (finance = relations of production, together with its civilizational-theoretical unfolding), an adjustable protective belt (concepts at each tier can be locally revised without shaking the hard core), and it has already shown the capacity to integrate several "anomalies" (the long-standing problems of China's capital market).
The "progressive programme once the two volumes are combined": the earlier book is "the rudiments of a progressive programme at the ideal + normative tiers"; once the new book "the gushing spring" supplies the "utilitarian-value tier," the system possesses for the first time "the rudiments of a progressive programme across all tiers." But it still lacks a decisive step: predicting an empirical fact that has not yet been observed. Until that is done, its explanatory power should be judged as "strong integrative explanation, unconfirmed predictive explanation."
Added judgment — the effect of the gap in hardening the three internal relations: if work on hardening N8 is not begun within the next three years, the complete framework of "subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function" will be simplified in the network of citation into "the three-tier structure," or misread as "a theory of Chinese exceptionalism" or "a Confucian-centred theory," and the system will be covered by the scenario of discursivization faster than previously assessed.
Added judgment — the effect of the gap in jointing the two volumes: if work on formalizing Gap Eight (the jointing of the two books) is not begun within the next three years, "the transcendence of finance" will be misread as "an upgrading of financial technique," the force of the destination proposition's "fivefold transcendence" will be diluted into "five financial instruments," and the advantage of full-tier coverage that the two-part whole achieves will degenerate into "two books placed side by side."
Added judgment — the effect of alignment in external coordinates: the configuration of "formal isomorphism with substantive complementarity" between Karatani and Zhang Keliang is a scarce resource position for the system in international dialogue. If the record of the dialogue with Karatani is not begun within the next three years, the system will maintain the "formal solitude" of being "the sole isomorphic figure now living" in international dialogue — which is at once an advantage (occupying the resource position alone) and a risk (having no interlocutor).
The proposals for improvement are directed exclusively at "the intrinsic qualities of the theory itself" and do not touch dissemination. They are ordered in four groups: "logical hardening → empirical hardening → test hardening → interface-building."
| P2 | D2 | Complete formal records of dialogue with the four neighbouring frameworks | Gap Five: no documentation of external interfaces | Write one paper each on the agreements and differences with humanistic economics, with Jin Guantao's research on Axial civilizations, with Eisenstadt's school of civilizational analysis and with the international literature on financialization | Partly incorporated |
| Priority | No. | Improvement item | Defect addressed | First step | State of alignment with the system's seventh-tier action list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P0 | A1 | Compile the appendix Core Propositions and Conditions of Use | N1–N3 and other strong equations are not labeled for type or boundary | Label the logical type of every proposition carrying an "=" or a "determines" (definition / ideal type / empirical hypothesis / policy criterion), and write out for each "what happens if it is falsified" | Incorporated |
| P0 | A2 | Construct the transmission chain between tiers: "ideal — institution — finance — distribution" | Gap One: leap of scale, suspension between tiers | Write out the mechanism argument for a five-step transmission, supplying one observable proxy at each step: ultimate concern → meaning and trust → enforceability of contracts → financial structure → pattern of distribution | Incorporated |
| P0 | A0 | Compile the special chapter Hardening the Three Internal Relations (Subordination / Containment / Delimitation / Adaptation / Substance-Function) | N8.1–N8.5, the upgraded N1; Gap Seven | Make explicit the criteria for the five dimensions of the "internal relations" — the one-way directionality of subordination and the feedback channel from below; the lag and threshold of containment; the balance of "embracing" and "regulating" in delimitation; the critical point of order and disorder in adaptation (failure to recover within three generations counting as failure); the boundary of "the substance does not change" for substance and function; and mark every use with a symbol in the text | Not incorporated — the seventh-tier action list has no separate entry; one must be added |
| P0 | A5 | Compile the special chapter Notes on the Jointing of the Two Books | Gap Eight; sub-gaps 8.1–8.3 | Write one or two pages each on the evolution of the proposition from wave–particle duality versus "finance = relations of production," on the role of the New Third Board case across the two books, and on the hierarchical relation between "the transcendence of finance" and "the transcendence of civilization" | Not incorporated — the seventh-tier action list has no separate entry; one must be added |
| P0 | B1 | Launch an agenda of cross-national middle-range comparative research | Gap Three: a single empirical anchor | Compare three cases — Germany (universal banking), Japan (main bank) and the United States (market-dominated) — on "type of financial system → pattern of growth and distribution," to test the proposition "who controls finance" | Incorporated |
| P0 | B2 | Establish the historical natural experiment of periodizing China's financial system | The same as above; testing the historical dimension of the proposition | Take 1949 (fiscal dominance), the 1990s (the establishment of the capital market), 2004 (the exchange-rate reform), 2018 (the new asset-management regulations) and 2021 (the Beijing Stock Exchange) as institutional breaks, and conduct an event study | Incorporated |
| P0 | B0 | Build a library of observable proxies for the instruments newly added in "the gushing spring" | The empirical support for the new instruments (wave–particle duality, the three-tier distribution theory, the stabilization fund, capital policy) is weak | Establish at least one observable proxy for each mature new instrument — wave–particle duality corresponding to "the number of financial instruments versus an index of the undulation of the financial system"; the three-tier distribution corresponding to "an indicator of meta-distribution (the structure of ownership of newly created capital)"; the stabilization fund corresponding to "M2/GDP and an indicator of liquidity temperature"; capital policy corresponding to "an indicator of the structure of capital formation" (the "gas–liquid–solid phase transition of money" has been marked by the author as not to be generalized for now and is not counted in this item) | Partly incorporated — item 8 of the seventh-tier action list, "B3 the proposition of the critical point of phase transition," points in a similar direction but has a different object |
| P1 | A3 | Supply the metaphor of "cancer" with the mechanism of "immunity — co-evolution" | N4: the contradiction between the thesis of necessary death and the resilience of capitalism | Conceptualize social protection, regulation and the stabilization fund as the immune response of civilization, and rewrite the pathology as "cyclical deterioration — immune tug-of-war" | Incorporated |
| P1 | A4 | Make explicit the criteria of "the mapping of the three great leaps" | N6: the risk of circular argument | Publish the mapping rule: "the tier supplied by a leap = the bottleneck tier constraining the continuity of civilization in that period," acknowledging spillover across tiers and giving the way it is to be handled | To be developed |
| P1 | B3 | Upgrade the metaphor of phase transition into a testable proposition of the critical threshold | Gap Four: no forward-looking corollaries | It must be noted — the proposition of "the gas–liquid–solid three-state phase transition of money" has been marked by the author himself (2026-09-10) as "not yet perfected, not to be generalized for now," so this item should be expressed as "a potential item for testing once the author has perfected it": once the share of direct financing / venture capital crosses a certain critical interval, a structural leap occurs in innovative output (testable by threshold regression), and the stabilization fund corresponds to the regulation of the temperature of liquidity indicators | To be incorporated once the author has perfected it |
| P1 | C1 | Build the Proposition–Data Crosswalk and an open-source database | Gap Four; the absence of testing infrastructure | Pair each core proposition with official data sources and indicators | Incorporated |
| P1 | C2 | Establish a longitudinal case library for the Beijing Stock Exchange and a set of comparable markets abroad | Instrument F's empirical support is single | Take the Beijing Stock Exchange — New Third Board as the main case, and Taipei's TPEx, Korea's KOSDAQ and Britain's AIM as comparators, to test the thesis of the "water-management system" | To be developed |
| P2 | C3 | Publish the list Twenty Attackable Propositions | Weak falsifiability (N5 especially) | Attach to each proposition the sentence "if X is observed, this proposition is weakened" | Incorporated |
| P2 | D1 | Compile the Dictionary of Conceptual Boundaries | Gap Two: terminological confusion | Discriminate item by item | Incorporated |
The newly added P1 improvement item D0: complete the record of the dialogue between Karatani and Zhang Keliang — Kojin Karatani is the only living figure today who is "formally isomorphic with and substantively complementary to" Zhang Keliang as a three-tier all-pass thinker. It is proposed that a systematic record of the Karatani–Zhang dialogue be completed (30–50 pages), comparing item by item their agreements and differences with respect to the three-tier value structure, the dual transcendent breakthrough, the essence of finance and the mechanism of all-pass across the three tiers. This record is the building of the system's "scarce resource position" in international dialogue — if it is not completed, the configuration of "formal isomorphism" will remain in a state of "formal solitude," and the system will lack a dockable interlocutor in international dialogue. It answers Gap Five's need for "documentation of external interfaces."
The newly added P2 improvement item D3: write the special paper The Application of the Three Internal Relations in the Reading of China and the West — setting down in writing the precise formulations "the West = a binary split within ideal value, with the three tiers self-consistent upon the truncated presupposition of the 'rational economic man' and with containment and delimitation both failing" and "China = entering a new form through civilizational reconstruction, by the alternating adaptation of containment and delimitation," and making explicit in the paper the process of reading-correction by which "the thesis of a rupture among the three tiers in the West" is set aside. This paper is the system's "manual of reading-correction" for the comparison of Chinese and Western civilization — if it is not completed, the "three internal relations" will be simplified in the network of citation into "the three-tier structure," or misread as "a theory of Chinese exceptionalism" or "a Confucian-centred theory." It answers Gap Seven.
Proposal E1 (turn assets of metaphor into assets of theory). The physical metaphors at which the author excels (phase transition, wave–particle duality, the water-management system, cancer) are the system's most communicable assets, but at present they remain at the level of rhetoric. It is proposed that each metaphor be systematically supplied with an "operationalizable version."
Proposal E2 (apply the "sunlight" philosophy to the theory itself). The author professes that "public information builds a fault-tolerant mechanism." Logically this applies equally to the theory itself: actively publish the list of the most attackable propositions, and make the coding rules and data definitions public.
Proposal E3 (make "the risk of being dismembered by the disciplines" the first constraint on the design of the system). A system of three-tier all-pass penetrated by a single engine has no innate immunity against being "dismembered by the disciplines"; the only countermeasure is actively to design portable modules for the "joints of penetration."
Proposal E4 (make "the jointing of the two books" the first constraint on the integrity of the system). Once the two volumes are combined, the first constraint on the integrity of the system is upgraded from "three-tier all-pass" to "two books + three-tier all-pass." The only countermeasure is actively to design a portable module for "the jointing of the two books":
Proposal E5 (make "the formalization of the three internal relations" the first constraint on the semantic clarity of the system). As the living part of the main axis of analysis, the clarity of the three-tier "internal relations" (subordination / containment / delimitation / adaptation / substance-function) directly determines the fate of the system in the network of citation. The only countermeasure is actively to make the five dimensions of the "internal relations" explicit in the text — so that every use marks the dimension it involves, every reading of China and the West carries a "note of reading-correction," and every discussion of the dual transcendent breakthrough carries a "note on the state of containment / delimitation."
The linking sub-section, "the reproduction mechanism of the seventh tier." Section 6 of the Reassessment by the Three-Tier All-Pass Yardstick in the same directory has formalized the "seventh tier" — the four forms of the reproduction mechanism (disciplinization / organization / datafication / international recognition) + a 15-item action list (restructured into the four groups "logical hardening / empirical hardening / test hardening / interface-building"). The proposals for improvement in this review have been reconciled item by item with those 15 action items. The review formally acknowledges: the seventh tier is already an "endogenous working procedure" of this system, not an external expectation.
The horizon of this review: four dimensions + six additional dimensions. Beyond the original four dimensions, six additional dimensions are set up:
The overall verdict of this review remains "a heuristic synthetic paradigm," but the concrete sense of "heuristic" has expanded from "good thought" to "good thought + good working procedures + the integrity of the two books + the clarity of the three internal relations." If the P0 operations (A1/A2/A0/A5/B1/B2/B0 — seven items in all) are completed on schedule within three years, and if general Proposals E3/E4/E5 can be translated into concrete designs, the system has every reason to be upgraded from "a heuristic synthetic paradigm" to one of the candidate paradigms of China's contemporary autonomous knowledge system; if they are not completed for the time being, its value as one school's view in the history of thought is already established — except that between "value established" and "paradigm established" there still lie four operations: "public adjudication made up of propositions, data and coding rules," "the portable module for the joints of penetration," "the formalized statement of the three internal relations," and "the argument for the integrity of the jointing of the two books."
Every criticism in this review is offered in a form open to refutation, and the author is welcome to respond to or overturn it point by point.
资本、金融与国家 - 20260910密集版.md, September 2026 intensive edition, 3,940 lines, 9 chapters + a reader's guide + a conclusion);Three formats are given below; click "Copy" to paste them directly into a paper or report. The access date is filled in automatically for the current day.
Zhang Keliang. A Comprehensive Paradigm Evaluation of Cultural and Political Economics: Review Opinion[EB/OL]. Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Personal Academic Portal, (2026-09-22)[2026-09-22]. https://zhangkeliang.com/en/文化政治经济学范式综合评价_评审意见.html.Zhang, K. (2026). A comprehensive paradigm evaluation of cultural and political economics: Review opinion. Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Personal Academic Portal. https://zhangkeliang.com/en/文化政治经济学范式综合评价_评审意见.htmlZhang, Keliang. "A Comprehensive Paradigm Evaluation of Cultural and Political Economics: Review Opinion." Cultural and Political Economics (Civilization Structure Theory) · Zhang Keliang Personal Academic Portal, 22 Sept. 2026, zhangkeliang.com/en/文化政治经济学范式综合评价_评审意见.html.