Zeng was born into a poor farmer's family in Yangjiang County, Guangdong, on 4 May 1935, during the Republic of China.[3] He secondary studied at Liangyang High School. In 1952, he enrolled in Peking University, majoring in meteorology, where he graduated in 1956.[3][4] In November 1956, he was sent abroad to study at the Institute of Geophysics of the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Union (now Russian Academy of Sciences) at the expense of the government, obtaining a vice-doctorate under the direction of Ilya Kibel in 1961.[3]
Zeng returned to China in 1961 and that same year was assigned to the Institute of Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he successively worked as assistant researcher and researcher.[3] In January 1961, he was transferred to the newly founded Institute of Atmospheric Physics, in which he moved up the ranks to become director in 1984.[5] He was a senior visiting scholar at Princeton University between December 1980 and April 1982. In 1995, he was proposed as president of China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM), succeeding Xiao Shutie. In 1998, he was unanimously chosen as president of China Meteorological Society which he held only from 1998 to 2002, although he remained as president of China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics until 2000.
