In 1944, Ho won and obtained financial support from the Sixth Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, and went to study in the United States in 1945.
Ho entered Columbia University in New York City, and graduated with a PhD in history in 1952.
In 1965, Ho was promoted to the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at the University of Chicago.
[4] He argued, following the Harvard school of John King Fairbank, that the Manchu rulers had become "sinicized" and did not have a distinctive non-Chinese approach.
[5] Xin Fan examines the intensity of Ho's passionate attacks on the New Qing History in the 1990s.
The new historiography was based on Manchu-language sources—Not Chinese language sources—and seemed to him to be an echo of the Japanese wartime imperialistic project of Manchuristic studies.