BS         Northwestern University, CHINA                     Sept 1956- Sept 1960

PhD       Yale University, USA                                          Sept 1991- May 1994

1939-1960 (Insights from the tumultuous years of youth)

Rao was born in 1939 in Hong Kong and raised in Beijing from 1940, later in Wuhan. At age eleven, he served as chairman of the city-wide International Children’s Day celebrations in Wuhan in 1950 and remained a principal organizer of youth activities in the city until age seventeen. In 1957, during his sophomore year, the CCP branded him as an anti-party, anti-socialist Rightist, sentencing him to forced labor in coal mines and jungles between 1957 and 1960 while retaining his student status. 

After seven years as an influential student leader, he was suddenly thrown into an abyss of hardship. His efforts, once devoted to national revitalization, became evidence of alleged crimes. Yet over the ensuing years, this ordeal, while profoundly painful, gradually liberated him from earlier confusion, grief, and indignation, launching a lifelong pursuit of observation and introspection into the cultural distortions that most gravely endanger human civilization.

1960-1980 (An awakening of life sparked by negentropy)

In the fall of 1960, Rao, who was still labeled a rightist, was unexpectedly hired by the University of Science and Technology of China… In 1979, Science Press published his book Thermodynamics in Geochemistry (448,000 words) in Beijing that was written in secret during the Cultural Revolution. This publication caused a tremendous sensation in China.

Upon entering USTC, he immediately began exploring how Western academia applied thermodynamic theory to the study of geological processes. During the turbulent and bloody era of the Cultural Revolution, he would often hide away late at night in a laboratory or the basement of a library to continue his research. Although his works were published in Chinese, the academic framework he constructed, which reveals the rigorous beauty of thermodynamics, utilizes advanced mathematics, a universal language fully understood and accepted by the Western scientific community. This accomplishment paved the way for his subsequent appointments at two top North American universities in 1984 and 1990. Drawing on this academic background and his study of the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi, he embraced Erwin Schrödinger’s profound insight: that life relies on a mechanism of “self- education” to maintain negative entropy, thereby counteracting the disorder caused by the natural increase of entropy. This perspective formed the cornerstone of his lifelong attitude toward confronting adversity.

1980-1990 (Introspection after the mirage disappears)

Rao served as Professor at USTC and its Beijing Graduate School (1980–1989); Chairman of the Department of Environmental Science at Qingdao University (1985–1988); Professor at the Beijing Graduate School and Beijing Institute of Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1985–1989); and visiting professor at the University of Toronto (1984–1985). He also served as chief scientist for the Chinese side in a France–China joint program on global environmental modeling (1985–1989).  

As a political pariah, he confronted tyranny armed with academic achievements earned through years of arduous effort under immense pressure and secured limited dignity and freedom. In Canada, studying the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights led him to where he could realize his dreams. Through a unique health lifestyle, he has avoided paralysis that might otherwise have resulted from a severe spinal injury sustained during forced labor in youth. The June 4^th massacre of 1989 shattered his illusions about mainland China, making him seek an effective way to true freedom.

1990-Present (An observation and historical reflection in mature life)

From 1990 to 1997, Rao served as a research scientist at Yale University, supported by NSF and DOE grants. He subsequently worked as a senior developer and architect at IT firms in Boston and California (1997–2009). His research encompassed geochemical cycles, global environmental modeling, thermodynamic applications in earth and environmental sciences, error propagation in geochemical calculations, elemental abundance in the Earth’s crust, etc.

While integrating himself into the realms of Western natural science and technology, he drew upon his lifelong experiences and applied that same rigorous professional spirit to examine the profound crisis of civilization He applied the logical “chisel” of thermodynamics and Schrödinger’s principle of negative entropy to examine the development from cultural distortion to genocide. Experiencing a profound sense of déjà vu in America, he observed the same communist “cultural virus” that executed Cultural Genocide on the Chinese mainland circling back to infect the West under the disguises of democratic socialism, critical race theory, cancel culture, and politicized science. In his 2025 book, Déjà vu: Confronting the Cultural Distortion Caused by Communism, he exposes how Western radical elitists have aligned with the CCP’s “red crony capitalism” to erode the moral immunity of the free world, calling for a grand synthesis of Western Judeo-Christian and classical wisdom with authentic, pre-communist Chinese virtues preserved today in Taiwan (ROC).

 author of this book is also the owner and the builder of this website.