The li (里, lǐ) is a traditional Chinese unit of distance, which has varied considerably over time but now has a standardized length of 500 meters or half a kilometer (c. 1640 feet). A modern li consists of 1,500 Chinese "feet" or chi and, in the past, was often translated as a "mile." Since the li has generally been only about a third as long as the mile, translating the character as "Chinese mile" or simply "li" is much less likely to produce confusion or error.

The character 里 combines the characters for "field" (田, tián) and "earth" (土, tǔ), since it was considered to be about the length of a single village. In Chinese, li is sometimes prefaced by the character shi (市, shì) to distinguish it from the kilometer proper or gongli (公里, gōnglǐ).

There is also another li (Traditional: 釐, Simplified: 厘, lí) that indicates a unit of length 1/1000th of a chi, but it is used much less commonly. This li is used in the People's Republic of China as the equivalent of the centi- prefix in metric units, thus limi (厘米, límǐ) for centimeter. The tonal difference makes it distinguishable to speakers of Chinese, but unless specifically noted otherwise, any reference to "li" will always refer to the longer traditional unit and not to either the shorter unit or the kilometer. This traditional unit, in terms of historical usage and distance proportion, can be considered the East Asian counterpart to the Western league unit.