"[4] Li has been also associated with performance arts group Shen Yun ("Divine Rhythm"), and the media organizations The Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty Television, which operate as extensions of Falun Gong.
Accounts between Li's supporters and detractors diverge significantly, and as a result, can be understood within the context of the political and spiritual purposes for which different narratives were developed.
As Benjamin Penny wrote, "as with its precursors [in Chinese history], this biography seeks to establish a genealogy of the figure whose life is recorded and to buttress the orthodoxy of his doctrine.
"[2] Both biographies were omitted from later printings of Falun Gong books, as Li explained that he did not want people to focus their attention on his own history or circumstances.
[12] Zhu Haiguang's version of the biography notes that Li consistently refused to take part in the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, never joining the Red Guards or communist organizations.
[12] Chinese government accounts emphasize repeatedly that Li lacks a higher education, and was an undistinguished student, notable only for playing the trumpet.
The group left the Falun Gong movement, and proceeded to send to government ministries a series of accusations against Li, among them that he had not shown any supernatural powers during his youth.
[2] In 2017, Professor James R. Lewis analyzed a 2015 report by Kaiwind, an anti-cult non-profit group in China, and agreed with their photographic evidence that Li was born on 7 July 1952.
Li's success was largely linked to the huge popularity enjoyed by qigong in the late 1980s and early 1990s under Deng Xiaoping's social liberalization.
Li said that Falun Gong was a part of a "centuries-old tradition of cultivation", and in his texts would often attack those who taught "incorrect, deviant, or heterodox ways".
[25] Li differentiated Falun Gong from other movements in Qigong by emphasizing moral values aimed to "purify one's heart and attain spiritual salvation"[26][page needed] rather than what he saw as undue emphasis on physical health and the development of supernatural powers.
[citation needed] Ian Johnson pointed out that during the greatest period of Falun Gong book sales in China, Li Hongzhi never received any royalties because all publications were bootleg.
[27] Li's success also had a large part to do with people seeking alternative medicine treatments at a time when China's health care system was struggling desperately to meet demand.
[21] As the Master of the Falun Gong cultivation system, Li claimed to "purify the students' bodies" and "unblock their main and collateral channels" and in doing so "remove the root of their disease", if they were ill.
[2] In Li's Falun Gong teachings, he emphasizes that practitioners should abide by the moral principles of truth, compassion and forbearance, in their daily lives.
[28] According to New Zealand scholar Heather Kavan, these principles have been repeated by Falun Gong members to outsiders as a tactic for evading deeper inquiry.
[12] The event helped cement Li's popularity in the qigong world, and journalistic reports of Falun Gong's healing powers spread.
[12] The following year, Li was made a member of the organizing committee of the Beijing Health Expo, and won several awards and commendations at the event.
Li gave lectures at the Public Security University in Beijing in 1994, and contributed proceeds from the seminars to a foundation for injured police officers.
[12] Falun Gong associations and clubs began appearing in Europe, North America and Australia, with activities centered mainly on university campuses.
[22] In 1996, the city of Houston named Li as an honorary citizen and goodwill ambassador for his "unselfish public service for the benefit and welfare of mankind.
[34] By April 2001, Li Hongzhi had received over 340 awards and proclamations from Australia, Canada, China (before crackdown), Japan, Russia, and the U.S. in recognition of the contributions to people's spiritual and physical health, and to freedom of belief in the world.
According to a March 2020 report by Samuel Braslow published in Los Angeles Magazine: In 2000, Li founded Epoch Times to disseminate Falun Gong talking points to American readers.
Over the years Shen Yun and Epoch Times, while nominally separate organizations, have operated in tandem in Falun Gong's ongoing PR campaign against the Chinese government, taking directions from Li.
That all changed in June 2015 after Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, proclaiming that he "beat China all the time".
As a former Epoch Times editor told NBC News, the group's leaders "believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the communist party".
According to NBC News: Reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian speculates that Li Hongzhi's anti-miscegenation beliefs, based on the argument that multiracial heritage has no place in a supposedly race-segregated heaven, could have influenced The Epoch Times' support of German far-right nativism.
[30] Falun Gong's cosmology includes the belief that different ethnicities each have a correspondence to their own heavens, and that individuals of mixed race lose some aspect of this connection.
[45][46][47] Falun Gong's teachings include belief in reincarnation and that one's soul (original spirit) always maintains single racial identity despite having a body of mixed race.