Zou was born in Shanghai, on 9 February 1936, while her ancestral home is in Pinghu, Zhejiang.
[1] After studying a year of Russian language at Beijing Russian College in 1955, she was sent to study at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Film and Television on government scholarships.
She joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in August 1987.
In May 2010, she joined the faculty of School of Chemical Engineering, Tianjin University.
On 15 March 2011, she was hired as director of the Printing Electronics Research Center of Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication.