He received an excellent early education in the Chinese classics, and then studied English in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at Yenching University in Beijing.

His translations of the Romantic age poet Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly impressed the noted scholar and novelist Qian Zhongshu.

After graduation, Zhou taught English at Sichuan University for a short time before returning to Beijing where he worked at the People’s Publishing House researching classical Chinese literature.

In 1953, Zhou published his first and most famous work Honglou Meng Xinzheng 红楼梦新证 (New Evidence on Dream of the Red Chamber), a comprehensive 400,000 word study of the life of Cao Xueqin and his unique family.

That a bulky academic work of such serious nature should have sold three impressions amounting to 17,000 copies within four months (Sept. - Dec. 1953) is itself a fair comment on the merit of Zhou’s book.

The present author is indebted to Mr. Chou for his painstaking collection of invaluable materials from sources normally inaccessible to the public.”[4] In the book, Zhou advanced the thesis that Honglou Meng was largely autobiographical and reflected Cao Xueqin’s own tragic family history as Han bondservants who were attached to a Manchu Banner group.

In 1968 during the height of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou’s research papers were confiscated and he was sent to the countryside in Hubei province to tend a vegetable plot for “reeducation.” In 1970, he was rehabilitated and transferred back to Beijing.

Although Zhou formally belonged to the investigative studies school of redology, he disagreed with the drawing of clear boundaries between different scholarly approaches to Honglou Meng.