He began to gather atten in the 1990s, appearing on national television to attack qigong masters including Falun Gong, a spiritual group Beijing later outlawed as an “evil cult”.
Along the way, Sima Nan, whose real name was Yu Li, exposed the tricks of many so-called masters – performers who appeared to swallow fire, bend spoons, or break bricks with their heads – by staging the same tricks on state broadcaster CCTV to show that they did not have the superpowers they had claimed.
A decade later, he turned his attention to a new target – the United States and what he saw as American surrogates in China.
Sima Nan would frequently accuse groups or individuals of betraying China’s interests and colluding with the US, an approach that has earned him the nickname “the anti-US fighter”.