[1][2] Hu entered the Department of History of Sichuan University in September 1956, and became a faculty member after graduating in 1961.
[1] Hu died on 3 November 2019 at the West China Medical Center of Sichuan University in Chengdu, aged 86.
[1][2][3] Hu is most influential in public for his revisionist history of Zhang Xianzhong's massacres in Sichuan.
Hu's work is part of an academic current that portrays Zhang's rebellion as a proletarian revolution, a view which prevailed in the PRC since the 1970s.
Some scholars, particularly those not based in the People's Republic of China, have criticized Hu's work as denialism, especially for his outright rejection of primary sources that indicate high civilian casualties during Zhang's rule, with the rationale that these sources reflect "landlords' views".