Native of Zibo, Shandong Province. He received his PhD from Zhejiang University and a postdoctoral Fellow in Literature from Shandong University. He is now a professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Confucius Institute of Culture, Qufu Normal University, and Director of the Centre for Confucianism and Literature Studies, a Young Expert of the Taishan Scholars, visiting scholar of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is mainly engaged in the Han, Wei, Jin, North and South Dynasties Confucianism, the interaction between the official system and literature.