First Chinese Premier Zhou was a gay?

It is a contention certain to be controversial in China, where the Communist Party likes to maintain its top leaders are more or less morally irreproachable and where homosexuality is frowned upon, though no longer officially repressed. This is the first book of Hong Kong-based Tsoi Wing-mui, a former editor at a liberal political magazine. She re-read already publicly available letters and diaries of Zhou and his wife, Deng Yingchao, to conclude that Zhou was probably gay. 

Zhou was premier from October 1949 until his death from cancer in 1976. Tsoi re-read books published by the party in 1998 to mark the 100th anniversary of Zhou’s birth that contained public essays and speeches by Zhou as well as his diary, letters, poems, novels and thesis from 1912 to 1924. “Zhou Enlai was a gay politician who had the misfortune of being born 100 years early,” Tsoi writes in her book. 

The book says Zhou was most fond of Li Fujing, a schoolmate two years his junior. Zhou wrote in his diary that he could not live one day without Li, writing, being with Li can “turn sorrow into joy”. Zhou and Li shared a dormitory from 1917 and “even their shadows do not part”, she wrote. Li died in 1960. Tsoi expects the book to be banned in China, where discussion of controversial personal details of senior leaders, especially historically significant ones like Zhou, are off limits.