Sportswoman of the Year from the Singapore National Olympic Council five times in a row between 2002 and 2006, and received a Meritorious Award in 2007. At the club competition level, Li played in the Chinese Table Tennis Super League. In 2008, she represented Peking University club, and in 2010, she played for Beijing Holdings, a team including world champion Ding Ning. 2008 Summer Olympics Li represented Singapore for the third time in the Olympic Games at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She was the flag-bearer for Team Singapore at the opening ceremony of the Games on 8 August, having requested the honour. She explained: "There has been so much debate over the foreign talent scheme. This is my way of showing everyone that everything I've ever achieved is because of Singapore." At the Beijing Olympics, on 13 August 2008, the Singapore women's table tennis team, coached by Liu Guodong and with Li as the team captain leading teammates Feng Tianwei and Wang Yuegu, beat teams from the United States and Nigeria with comfortable 3–0 wins. On 14 August, the Singapore team also defeated the Netherlands 3–0 to reach the semifinals, but not before a gruelling five-game doubles match against the Dutch players Li Jie and Elena Timina which Li Jiawei and Wang Yuegu eventually won 3–2. The next day, 15 August, the Singapore team defeated the South Korean team of Dang Ye-Seo, Kim Kyung-Ah and Park Mi-Young 3–2 in the semifinals, which went to five matches. Li lost her singles match to Korea's Kim, but beat Kim and Park in the doubles with her partner Wang. Singapore's Feng won both her singles matches against Dang and Park. On 17 August, Li and her teammates gained Singapore a silver medal in women's table tennis after losing to China in three matches. Li won the first game of her singles match, but was then defeated by her former Beijing Sports School teammate Zhang Yining. In the doubles match, China's Zhang and Guo Yue bested Singapore's Li and Wang Yuegu. This marked the first time that Singapore had won an Olympic medal since the nation's independence in 1965. The medal came 48 years after Tan Howe Liang won the country's first medal, a silver in weightlifting in the lightweight category at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong requested that the live English-language broadcast of his National