Whether Mandarin Chinese has tense has been the subject of much debate. In this paper, I offer novel observations on the distribution and syntactic properties on a less-studied future-marking particle, jiang. I argue that these properties of jiang show that Mandarin Chinese has syntactic tense: jiang is syntactically a future tense morpheme, and not a modal auxiliary, nor a time adverb or an irrealis marker. Mandarin Chinese clauses are thus minimally T (ense) Ps, like clauses in languages with overt tense morphology. In addition, I show that empirical evidence supports two predictions consistent with this analysis: first, jiang is incompatible with bare nominal predicates, as expected if tense-marking requires an overt verbal host for syntactic well-formedness (as argued by Lin (2010)); second, jiang is infelicitous in clausal complements of control verbs, suggesting that Chinese has a finite/nonfinite distinction (pace Hu, Pan, and Xu (2001)). Lastly, I discuss how this syntactic proposal might relate to existing semantic analyses of jiang and accounts of temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese.