Wenfang Tang
Chinese political scientist

Wenfang Tang (Chinese: 唐文方) is a political scientist and expert in Chinese politics. He is currently a Presidential Chair Professor and the dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Prior to this, he held positions at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Iowa, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Education and career
In 1977, the People's Republic of China reinstated the National Higher Education Entrance Examination (Gaokao) that had been suspended for 10 years due to the Cultural Revolution. That year, Tang was admitted to Peking University's Department of International Politics. After his graduation from Peking University in 1982, he went to the United States for graduate studies and earned an MA in political science from the University of Kansas in 1985 and a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1990.
Between 1990 and 2009, Tang started his academic career in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he rose through the ranks of assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. Between 2009 and 2019, he worked at the University of Iowa and was appointed the C. Maxwell and Elisabeth M. Stanley Hua Hsia Professor of Political Science and International Studies and the Chair of the Department of Political Science. In 2019, Tang moved to Hong Kong, and served as the Head and Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology until 2022. In March 2022, he joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in Mainland China, where has since then been a Presidential Chair Professor and the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science.
The public source identifies “Wenfang Tang” as chinese political scientist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wenfang, Tang and Chinese.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q130296479. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1982, 1985 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wenfang Tang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.