He graduated from Peking University with a Bachelor of Law that year, before pursuing a postgraduate political science program.
He travelled to the United States in 1986 to attend a comparative politics course at Rutgers University, where he graduated with his Master of Arts in 1990.
He transferred to Yale University, where he received an MA in art history in 1992, as well as a M.Phil in the same field the following year.
After Bai briefly worked as a visiting professor at Harvard University in the spring of 2002, the Harvard University Asia Center published his first English-language book, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century, the following year.
[5] In 2015, he returned to China to serve as a professor of art history at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.