Hsiao first travelled to the United States in 1920 on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program,[1] remaining there for six years and earning a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1926.

[3] With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he left to teach at Sichuan University and Kwang Hua University.

Frustrated by the shortage of research materials produced by the Chinese Civil War, he went to teach at National Taiwan University in 1949, and continued to the United States later that year.

Hsiao's magnum opus is his two-volume Zhōngguó zhèngzhǐ sīxiǎng shǐ 中國政治思想史 ["History of Chinese Political Thought"], a work that traces Chinese political thought from its earliest recorded history in the Shang dynasty to his day.

An English translation of the first volume by the American Sinologist Frederick W. Mote was published by Princeton University Press in 1979, but the second volume has never been translated into English.