A Chinese national convicted of murdering a well-known U.S.-based Chinese dissident in Queens has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The 2022 stabbing death of Jim Li, a New York lawyer, by Zhang Xiaoning, a 27-year-old woman from China, sent shock waves through New York’s Chinese American community.
On Wednesday, she was sentenced in the Queens Criminal Court in Queens County, New York.
Zhang was charged and convicted of Li’s murder in September.
At the time of his death, Zhang had been applying for political asylum in the United States and Li was her lawyer. It emerged that she had gotten into an argument with him in early March 2022 in his Flushing office, and he said that he could no longer represent her.
She showed up several days later, armed with a paring knife and a kitchen knife. She stabbed him repeatedly in the chest and neck in his office, and then she left a Chinese Communist Party flag on a chair.
He died shortly afterwards at a Queens hospital.
As she was sentenced, Zhang Xiaoning broke into tears. She said that the punishment would mean that she would not be able to return to China to see her 80-year-old grandmother. She will be eligible for parole in 25 years.
Li, 66, a prominent activist, had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a student at Beijing University. He escaped the massacre, but he was arrested later at his home in Wuhan. He was imprisoned and then, in 1991, he came to the United States. He was a co-founder of a human-rights organization, the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, in Flushing.
Members of Li’s family sat in the courtroom on the day of sentencing, as well as his longtime friends, Wang Juntao, the chairman of the China Democracy Party, and Zhang Jing (no relation to Zhang Xiaoning), also a democracy activist.
Reflecting on the sentencing, Wang said he felt that it was just. Later on Wednesday, Wang said that he drove to Li’s grave at Washington Memorial Cemetery in Suffolk County, Long Island. “I have to tell Jim Li the news,” he told RFA.
Zhang Jing, who was also present in the courtroom, told RFA: “[Jim] Li was a trusted friend, and this verdict brings some closure for his death.”
He wasn’t just an important leader, she said, he was also a source of strength and spirit: “He was always so clear in his convictions, and he absolutely hated communist tyranny.”
Edited by Boer Deng and Jim Snyder.