As new technologies and media—from online platforms and short-form video to intelligent algorithms—have evolved and spread, they have reshaped the ecosystem of knowledge dissemination, helping move more scholarly knowledge from specialized domains into the public sphere while fostering more open forms of social participation in academic activity. Against this backdrop, public scholarship has come into sharper view. Compared with earlier “academic popularization,” which primarily involved disseminating knowledge to the general public, the current wave of public scholarship is marked above all by public participation. Members of the public are no longer merely passive recipients of knowledge; through discussion, feedback, and communication, they are engaging more deeply in scholarly activity.

Among the many academic issues that attract public attention, economics stands out for its strong connection to real-world concerns and public discussions. As Chinese modernization continues to advance, practical issues such as stabilizing employment, increasing incomes, and ensuring people’s wellbeing have consistently drawn widespread attention. Research topics such as the digital economy and platform economy, the silver economy and population aging, and the low-altitude economy and emerging industrial clusters also frequently prompt public discussion. These developments provide a solid practical foundation for public scholarship in economics, while also placing new demands on economic research in China.

To promote high-quality socioeconomic development, it has become necessary to guide and encourage the healthy and sustainable development of public scholarship. Economics has never been a discipline confined to the ivory tower; rather, it is a practical science closely connected to daily life and people’s wellbeing. Issues of great public concern—such as employment prospects, price fluctuations, income changes, and investment expectations—are all linked to broader economic performance, policy orientation, and development models. If economics becomes detached from public concerns, it risks losing its grounding in reality.

Precisely because economics is so closely tied to real-world issues, it should not remain an inward-facing conversation among specialists. Instead, it should actively enter public discussion by explaining complex issues, clarifying the logic of development, and making policy intentions more intelligible. Bringing economics closer to the public, however, does not mean chasing online traffic. Rather, it means identifying problems, dispelling misunderstandings, and building consensus through broader practice and exploration. Advocating public participation is not about lowering academic standards, but about maintaining theoretical depth and professional judgment while responding to real-world concerns.

The value of public scholarship lies not only in helping the public better understand economics, but also in enabling economics to move closer to the public. This is especially important for Chinese economics. China’s immense geographic scale, pronounced regional disparities, uneven stages of development, and wide-ranging local conditions give rise to economic phenomena of remarkable diversity and complexity. Relying solely on a small number of established theoretical frameworks to understand reality may easily lead scholars to overlook the richness of China’s experience. Practice shows that many truly important economic questions emerge first in real life rather than in academic publications.

Issues such as income volatility among platform workers, divergent development trajectories among county-level economies, increasingly cautious consumption tendencies among young people, shifting household burdens caused by population aging, and the influence of housing and education expenditures on household decision-making are often first experienced by the public and reflected in public discussion before being refined and further examined in academic research.

The space for public interaction opened up by public scholarship allows social experience, grassroots observations, and market feedback that might otherwise remain outside the scope of academic inquiry to be more directly transformed into sources of economic research questions. It also allows practitioners on the front lines of production and daily life to raise questions, participate in discussions, and express their views on related issues, helping develop a problem-identification mechanism that places greater emphasis on practical realities and primary-level experience. At the same time, when economic knowledge enters public life in a broader, more reliable, and more accessible manner, it helps cultivate financial literacy, rational thinking, and an awareness of rules among the general public.

Wang Huan is an assistant research fellow from the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.