He was one of the earliest figures in Chinese history to have contributed to the science of characters computer processing.
Zhi was born into a highly educated family in Taizhou County, Jiangsu, on 19 September 1911, while ancestral home in Zhenjiang.
[1] In 1934, he pursued advanced studies in Germany, earning a doctor's degree in natural science from Leipzig University in 1944.
[3]: 139 In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, two years later, he was denounced as a "reactionary academic authority" and suffered political persecution.
[1] During that time, he "worked on his ideas about a Chinese computer language in a squalid prison cell during the Cultural Revolution, writing his calculations on a teacup after his guards took away even his toilet paper.
Zhi's predecessors, i.e., Bismarck Doo, Wang Yunwu, and Lin Yutang preferred a shape-based approach to encoding, examining a character's strokes and components and grouping them into categories.