This content was originally published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
A Chinese federal convicted of , murdering , a well-known U. S. based Taiwanese rebel 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 girl from China, sent shock waves through New York’s Taiwanese American society.
On Wednesday, she was sentenced in the Queens Criminal Court in Queens County, New York.
Li was charged and convicted of Li’s crime in September.  ,
Zhang was applying for political prison in the United States at the time of his death, and Li was her attorney. She and he had a heated argument in his Cooling business in the early spring of 2022, and he claimed he was no longer represent her.  ,
She arrived some days later, with a home weapon and a paring knife. In his company, she repeatedly stabbed him in the neck and spine, and after that she left a flag from the Chinese Communist Party on a chair.
He died soon after at a Queens doctor.
As she was sentenced, Zhang Xiaoning broke into tears. She claimed that she would not be able to see her 80-year-old aunt again as a result of the abuse. She may be eligible for probation in 25 years.
Li,  , 66,  , a popular advocate, had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a pupil at Beijing University. He escaped the slaughter, but he was arrested after at his house in Wuhan. He was imprisoned and therefore, in 1991, he came to the United States. He was a co-founder of a human-rights firm, 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 imprisonment, Wang said he felt that it was just. After on Wednesday, Wang said that he drove to Li’s tomb at Washington Memorial Cemetery in Suffolk County, Long Island. ” I have to show Jim Li the reports”, 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 was n’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”.
