Shiping Tang

He was described by an commentary from the Stimson Center as the "only prominent Chinese scholar who publicly predicted a war between Russia and Ukraine" before May 2021, through a model of state behaviour he developed. Back in 2009, after the Russo-Georgian War, he has already warned that Ukraine will be the next battleground. He published an op-eds to call for a neutral Ukraine to prevent the conflict in 2014.

Tang further explained the theoretical underpinning of his Social Evolutionary Paradigm in his book "On Social Evolution" (2020). Robert Jervis thinks Tang puts the evolutionary approach through its paces and shows how selection, variance, and inheritance operate to explain both macro and micro social developments. Peter J. Katzenstein thinks Tang succeeded marvelously in developing and defending the claim that "evolutionism triumphs over all other explanations of the natural and the social world."

His forecasting of a decisive win for Tsai Ing-wen in 2020 Taiwanese presidential election was deleted from Fudan University website, hours after its release.

He criticized a paper by Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor which claimed that genetic diversity has a relationship with economic development in 2016. He thinks that the paper ignored the "Eurasia effect" and have some "econometric error". Tang's rebuttal was endorsed by Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics from Columbia University, in an article for the Washington Post. Gelman thinks "this new paper by Tang could be useful in that it criticizes Ashraf and Galor on their own terms."

He is an Editorial Board Member of International Security, a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of international and national security edited by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and published four times a year by MIT Press, both of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the only Chinese national on the editorial board. He is the editorial board member of Security Studies (2015-) and International Studies Quarterly (2015-2020) as well.

In his book "The Social Evolution of International Politics" (2013), he He submits that human society has historically evolved from relatively benign relations in hunter-gatherer societies, to offensive realism systems, then to defensive realism systems, and finally to a more institutionally rule-based international system. Hendrik Spruyt thinks that unlike most international relations theories which are historical contingent, Tang's theory is trans-historical. Richard Ned Lebow thinks Tang produced a non-determinist and non-reductionist approach to social evolution that is distinct from and critical of evolutionary psychology.

Shiping Tang (born 24 January 1967) is a theorist of social sciences. He is the Fudan Distinguished Professor at Fudan University and also the Cheung Kong Distinguished Professor in the Chinese Ministry of Education. He is known for his works on the Social Evolutionary Paradigm in international relations. His book, The Social Evolution of International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2013), received the International Studies Association (ISA) “Annual Best Book Award” in 2015. He was the first Chinese and Asian scholar to receive this prestigious award. his most recent book is On Social Evolution (2020). He has been described as "one of Asia’s most influential social scientists".

He has commented on the Chinese politics in general. For example, he thinks political leaders should read the 1587, a Year of No Significance (Wanli Shiwunian) carefully to pre-empt failure of bureaucratic system which leads to great policy failures like those happened in the mid-Ming dynasty.