Yang Wang leads Simpson Thacher's China M&A/PE team from Beijing, advising private equity sponsors and multinational corporations on complex cross-border transactions. Yang’s practice spans three core areas: leveraged buyouts and private equity investments for leading global and Asia-based sponsors, including Apax, Blackstone, Hillhouse, KKR, Macquarie, PAG, Primavera and Warburg Pincus; strategic investments and corporate finance transactions for corporate clients, including Alibaba, Ant, ByteDance, Joyy, Pony.ai, TAL Education, Xpeng and Zeekr; and outbound investment transactions for China-based clients, including ChemChina, China Gold, China Railway, Chinalco and Zoomlion. Yang has been credited with at least one “Deal of the Year” every year in the past decade by various publications and agencies.
Yang has been recognized as a “Band 1” practitioner in Corporate/M&A by Chambers across its Global, Asia-Pacific and Greater China guides, rated as “Highly Regarded” by IFLR1000, and named “Private Equity: Foreign Firms Lawyer of the Year” at the Legal 500 China Awards in both 2024 and 2025. Chambers respondents have called Yang “a super lawyer, hugely commercial, very smart, always calm and completely on it” and “like a firefighter - he has saved me from so many risks and troubles.”
But Yang takes greater pride in what clients say about the team he leads. Legal 500, which rates the STB China M&A/PE team as “Tier 1,” reports that clients have described the team as “a go-to for high-stakes or complex transactions” and highlighted that “despite their past accomplishments and sterling credentials, the team remains highly responsive, adaptable and eager to serve clients.”
Yang received his J.D., magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, an Article Editor of the Michigan Law Review, and a recipient of the Jason L. Honigman Award. Before law school, Yang received a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude), a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science (magna cum laude), and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics, all from the University of Maryland, College Park. He spent four years as a computer engineer writing software in C++, Java and PHP before expropriating those skills to write MGAs, SPAs and SHAs, which he argues should be as functional and no less bug-free.
Outside of his practice, Yang is a member of the Board of Governors of Cranbrook Schools and a founding donor of named scholarships at the University of Michigan Law School, Nanjing University and Amherst College. He speaks English and Mandarin Chinese.