Li Zhensheng was born in August 1940, Dalian, family origin from Rongcheng, Shandong.

July 1963: graduated from Changchun Film Institute Photography Department, entered the Heilongjiang Daily and worked as a reporter for 20 years, then enrolled at the Photography Department of the National Police Academy University in Beijing and taught journalism for 15 years. During the Cultural Revolution decade he photographed and safeguarded nearly 100,000 photos as historical document.

In December 1987, the series of Cultural Revolution photography, titled “Let history tell the future”, won the “Arduous Process” News Photo Award which was then the highest award in national photography open competition.

In October 1996, invited by the Harvard University Fairbank Center for East Asia to give lectures, he took up residence in New York. He has been since giving lectures at Princeton, University of California-Berkeley, New York University, and top academic venues in Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels, London, Mexico City, Rotterdam, and others in the USA.

In June 2003, the French Ministry of Culture organized a major 3-month exhibition: “Li Zhensheng: a photographer in the Cultural Revolution” after the premiere in Paris in the Museum of Patrimoine Photographique - Hotel de Sully, the exhibition has since been touring Europe and North America.

In June 2003, Phaidon first published Red-Color News Soldier in French, and subsequently in five other lanuages: English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

In July 2003, Henri Cartier-Bresson the world’s master of photography took notice of the book “Red-Color News Soldier” (French title “Le Petit Livre Rouge d’un Photographe Chinois”), invited the author Li Zhensheng to visit him, and exceptionally accepted to pose for a picture with Li.

In January 2004, Red-Color News Soldier is named “A Book of the Year” by American Photo magazine, and won the Olivier Rebbot Award from the Overseas Press Club of America. It has been chosen as a contemporary history textbook in many universities in the United States.

In May 2005, Li Zhensheng was named one of the “54 World Press Photo Masters” and on the list of the “50 most influential Chinese”.

In July 2006 the Oxford Encyclopedia added the “Li Zhensheng” entry, first time that the Encyclopedia entered the name of a Chinese photographer. In September 2007, the Pingyao International Photo Festival held a Li Zhensheng retrospective exhibition?? jointly with “The Americans” by master photographer Robert Frank.