June 4 leader drops film lawsuit

Chai Ling, known during the Beijing protest days of 1989 as the fiery 'commander-in-chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters', has spent years pursuing the makers of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a controversial documentary that examined the student movement of that year, with a flurry of legal action. But after becoming a Christian late last year, she says she's dropping her case.

'After thinking it over, I instructed my lawyers ... to make an offer to Long Bow's lawyers to withdraw the suit,' she said. A Christian leader instrumental in her conversion said it was the proper thing to do, she said. 'My decision is motivated by my desire to see God glorified through this, so that more people may come to know him.'

The Long Bow Group said it had no knowledge of an offer to withdraw the lawsuit. On its webpage, it describes itself as a non-profit corporation, founded in 1982 to produce and disseminate educational media.

The story began on the morning of May 28, 1989, when Chai, then a 23-year-old graduate student, contacted Phillip Cunningham, a young American who later worked as a journalist with the BBC and ABC. Chai told Cunningham that she simply wanted to talk.

The petite psychology student from Beijing Normal University had just weeks earlier been propelled from nowhere to the leadership of the heady student movement. At that moment, a debate was raging among the students over what their next step should be. While some advocated leaving, Chai and supporters argued that they should continue the face-off with the central government, by refusing to vacate Tiananmen Square.

As she sat in a Beijing apartment with Cunningham, who filmed the interview with a home video camera, she could never have imagined that her choice of words - possibly spoken in haste - would two decades later be at the centre of a legal battle in the United States.

During the interview, Chai, sobbing dramatically at times, made comments that would haunt her to the present.