He held a personal chair as professor emeritus in Government and International Relations at Sydney University until his retirement in 2006.
He is especially known for his detailed studies, together with Warren Sun, on the history of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite politics.
After graduation, Teiwes worked as a journalist at Providence Journal in Westerly, Rhode Island.
He then enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, where he adopted a focus on the politics of China.
He worked for a year at Columbia’s Research Institute on Communist Affairs and then lived in Hong Kong, conducting research at the Universities Service Centre for China Studies for his thesis "Rectification campaigns and purges in Communist China, 1950-61".