Sheng Hong was born in December 1954 in Beijing and graduated from People’s University of China in 1983. In 1986 and 1990, he obtained a Master's degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1986-2001), Shandong University (2001-2013), and the Unirule Institute of Economics (1993-2019). He was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago (1993~1994), and currently is an independent scholar.