This is really nice.  And has a good freshness about it.   I may actually prefer it to the real Capcom sprites.

My G-d, what a shame to blame someone without carefull preparations!

At first, I thought just the same thing, why there is a sprite from the game, what is the difference.

But then I went to Google, searched some sprite-bases and now I can only say - well done, it's just awesome piece of practice. I like it very much.

I see.

Here's a side by side comparison of the real sprites and of my own.
As you can tell, I used the original SFII palette, and eyeballed a few parts from the Alpha 2 and SFIII sprites, and there is a similarity with the CVS2 sprite.
And here is the reference, which I used to sketch out the sprite: static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/gamespot/images/2009/features/sf-thenandnow/2137736-003c.jpg

You may notice that I report sprite rips, splices and edits on a regular basis on PJ, and I have enough integrity to not be a hypocrite.
 

Google image search "chun li sprite sheet". One of the animation frames looks exactly like your image, just a little recolored and resized.

Could you back that up with any proof?

Looks traced.