Born on January 5, 1932, in Shimen County, Hunan Province, Republic of China, with his father, a member of the Legislature, as his fourth child.

He transferred to a high school in Nanjing, which became the capital of Chiang Kai-shek administration again in 1946, after the collapse of Wang Jingwei regime.

In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his father and stepmother due to the Chinese Civil War, but separated from the four siblings who remained on the continent.

He entered the National Tsing Hua University in 1957 and received a master's degree from the Institute of Atomic Sciences Physics Group in June 1959.

He then went to the United States on a scholarship to study many-body problems [2] under Eugene Feenberg[3][4][5] at Washington University in St. Louis, and received his PhD in 1963.