Kuo Ting-liang was from Yunnan. In the Second World War he fought in Burma in Sun Li-jen's army, came to Taiwan with Sun after the war and served as a major in the army's training establishment.

In May 1955 he was arrested by the security services, named as a communist agent inside the army and accused of plotting a mutiny at a parade in Pingtung. Under interrogation by the Bureau of Secrets he signed a confession. That confession was the hinge of the whole Sun Li-jen case: in August Sun was removed as chief military aide to the president and then held under house arrest in Taichung for thirty-three years, and more than three hundred officers connected to him were caught up.

Kuo was sentenced to death, commuted to a long prison term. He served more than a decade and remained under supervision after release. When the supervision was lifted in 1988 he began to explain how the confession had been produced and to press Sun's case.

In November 1991 he fell from a moving train and died; the cause has never been settled. Twenty years later the Control Yuan's investigation concluded that the Sun Li-jen case had been a miscarriage of justice.