Henry Tugendhat is a Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, focused on Chinese activities in North Africa and the Middle East.
He first moved to China in 2004 to teach English in Ningbo and has focused his career on the country ever since. He later lived and worked in Beijing, then left to spend the past 15 years working on Chinese economic engagements in Africa, including extended fieldwork across the continent on telecommunications, trade finance, and agriculture, among other topics.
Tugendhat has worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the World Bank’s macroeconomics, trade, and investment team, the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, and the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. In these roles, he has regularly advised U.S. and foreign government officials, military leaders, and legislators.
His work appears frequently in leading academic journals and news outlets such as The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and War on the Rocks. He is completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and he holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Leeds, respectively. He speaks Mandarin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
He lives with his wife and three children in Washington, DC, where he enjoys playing piano and cooking the Chinese food that he misses most.
