His father, Zhong Zhaolin (钟兆琳), was a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
After graduating from Tongji University in 1956, he entered the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and studied under Qian Weichang and Hu Haichang.
[1] In 1962, on the recommendation of Hu Haichang, Zhong was transferred to the Dalian University of Technology (DUT) to work under Qian Lingxi.
They published two papers in Science in China and Acta Mechanica Sinica, on the "general variational theory of limit analysis and plasticity".
[1] He led a team of scientists, including Cheng Gengdong, that designed engineering software using group theory.