Chongqing Court Gives Eight Years for Pin-Down Death, Rejecting a Self-Defense Claim
A Chongqing court sentenced a man to eight years for pinning his sister's ex-boyfriend to the ground until he suffocated, after the man drew a knife while being beaten. The ruling, which rejected self-defense claims on every side, has become a national argument about who the law counts as a defender.
The man on the ground was Dai, 38, of a residential compound in Jiangjin, Chongqing, and the question the court had to answer was a deceptively simple one: who, in the fight that killed him, was defending themselves?
According to the first-instance verdict published by the Yangtse Evening Post, Dai had spent months in conflict with his ex-girlfriend Xiao Li and her new boyfriend Hong — she called police four times between September 2024 and February 2025 over the disputes. On the afternoon of March 30, 2025, after a third argument that day, Xiao Li's brother Li joined Hong in beating Dai; Dai pulled a 23-centimetre folding knife and stabbed at them, wounding Hong in the leg. The two men took the knife away and pinned him: Li knelt on his upper body, forearm across his jaw, for roughly three minutes while Dai's seven-year-old daughter cried and tried to pull him off. Hong said the words "we can let go now"; Li stayed down another fifteen seconds. By then Dai had stopped moving. The forensic finding was mechanical asphyxia from pressure on the neck, chest and abdomen.
On August 28 the Jiangjin District People's Court convicted Li of intentional injury and sentenced him to eight years. It rejected his claim of justifiable defence (正当防卫) — and, in the passage now being argued over across Chinese social media, it went further. Dai's knife, the court held, did not make him the aggressor: drawn while he was losing a fight Li had started, under sustained disadvantage, it was an act of desperation, not an unlawful attack. Li was therefore not stopping a crime when he pinned Dai down.
The reaction split along a line that had opened days earlier. One camp read the eight-year sentence as far too light for a restraint that continued after the fighting had stopped; the case ranked in Baidu's top searches, with commenters fixating on that fifteen seconds after "we can let go." The other camp turned on the victim's image. "Was he really worthy of sympathy?" one widely shared post asked, liked more than a hundred times within hours. "The ex-boyfriend harassed his ex and her new partner again and again, she called police four times with no result — and this time he came carrying a knife."
Underneath the argument sits a legal doctrine with a short recent history. For decades Chinese courts almost never accepted justifiable-defence claims; that began to loosen only after the 2018 case of a man in Kunshan who was killed with his own sword after attacking a cyclist with one — a verdict that made 正当防卫 a household term. The Jiangjin ruling applies the doctrine in a direction nobody had queued up to test: it treats the beaten man's knife as the defensive act, and the fatal restraint as the crime.
Dai's family has submitted a protest application to the procuratorate, arguing the sentence is too lenient; prosecutors must now decide whether to seek a retrial. The verdict's logic — that carrying a knife does not forfeit your claim to be the one under attack, and that holding a man down after he stops fighting is not defence — will govern whoever finds themselves in that courtyard next.