Chao was an active student at Grinnell. He celebrated the Chinese New Year with fellow Chinese students in 1922 (SB 01/28/1922). He also participated in their celebration of the founding of the Republic of China in October 1922 and sang duets with C. M. Chang as part of the program put on by the Chinese Students’ Club at Grinnell (SB 10/11/1922). In the same month with fellow Tsing Hua alum T. H. Cheng he played a flute duet at the local Congregational church as part of a program also organized by the Grinnell Chinese Students’ Club; speakers included fellow Chinese students K. C. Wu, C. C. Ma, C. M. Chang, and H. H. Yang (SB 10/21/1922). 

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in education and political science from Grinnell in 1923, Chao went to the University of Iowa and earned a master’s degree there in 1924. He then went on to Columbia University where he earned a master’s degree in economics in 1926. He joined the New York City reunion dinner in to see off Sin Chen in 1925 (SB 03/25/1925). In April 1926 he left New York City to travel in Europe and Africa, finally arriving in Shanghai in June of the same year. A Chinese newspaper hailed him as “the most economical tourist of Europe and the U.S.,” detailing the dates and expenses of his two-month-long itinerary (“Zhouyou Ou Mei”). 

After returning to China in 1926, Chao worked for the Nationalist party’s central committee in Nanjing for some time and then became the manager of Minguo ribao 民國日報 (Republican Daily) in Gansu. He got into political trouble after the newspaper published an expose of a local Nationalist official and was fired from that job. In the mid-1930s Chao served as the mayor of Jinta 金塔, Gansu province, and assisted Zhang Xinyi 張心一, a former Tsing Hua classmate who then became Chief of the Gansu Bureau of Public Works, to build the famous Yuanyang Chi 鴛鴦池 reservoir on the Taolai 討賴 River, called “the largest national hydraulic engineering project” when it was completed in 1947 (“Hexi zoulang”). We do not know when Chao passed away.