Boping Yuan became a worker in a carpentry workshop in China after his secondary school, and was among those first groups of people who entered universities when universities re-opened in China after the ten-year Cultural Revolution. He read English language and literature as an undergraduate at Yantai Normal University (now Ludong University), China, from 1978 to 1982. Then he taught English as a foreign language at universities in China and on the China Central Television.

In 1986, he entered Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, and did postgraduate studies in Applied Linguistics. In 1988, he got a scholarship from the British Council to study at Edinburgh University, where he first studied for an M.Sc. in Applied Linguistics and then for a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

In 1992, he came to Cambridge, where he has been teaching Chinese language and linguistics, directing the modern Chinese language program as well as supervising graduate students in developmental Chinese linguistics.

He also provides services for international academic journals and organizations, which include being the vice President (2005-2008) and executive member (2008-present) of the Executive Committee of The  International Society for Chinese Language Teaching. In 2012 he was elected as Regius Professor of Hebrew, which is his current position. Some of his honours include election as Fellow of the British Academy (1998), election as Honorary Fellow of the Academy of the Hebrew Language (2011), election as Fellow of Academia Europea (2014), election as Honorary Member of the American Oriental Society (2015),  election as Extraordinary Professor (Honorary) by the University of Stellenbosch (2016), the award of the Lidzbarski Gold Medal for Semitic philology by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (2004) and the award of an honorary doctorate by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017).