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.

"The students kept asking, `What should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher us. Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes."

There indeed was bloodshed a week later when the People's Liberation Army marched into the Chinese capital, opening fire on unarmed civilians around the city, and leaving hundreds, if not more than a thousand, people dead. The students peacefully exited Tiananmen Square in the early morning hours of June 4. Their leaders soon scattered around China, some arrested and sent to jail while others went into hiding, eventually being smuggled out of China via an underground rescue effort.

Chai's interview was later included in The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary that was made by Long Bow with the assistance of several well-known Western experts on China. The company was established by Richard Gordon and his wife Carma Hinton. An American who was born and raised in China, she was the daughter of William Hinton, a Pennsylvania farmer who was a strong supporter of the Chinese revolution and the author of the well-known book Fanshen, about land reform in China.

Hinton, who had moved to the United States to attend university, began working on the three-hour documentary in the summer of 1989. She would spend the next six years making it.

The documentary contains graphic footage of the crackdown and interviews with many of the major participants. It garnered acclaim but also aroused a great deal of controversy even before its first public showing.

The Chinese government tried to stop the film's premiere at the New York Film Festival in October 1995. When the organisers refused to pull the documentary, China ordered filmmaker Zhang Yimou not to attend the event, which was to open with his film, Shanghai Triad.

At the Washington Film Festival the following April, a Chinese embassy official said the documentary would "mislead the audience and hurt the feelings of 1.2 billion Chinese people".

Surprisingly, the strongest opposition came from some members of the Chinese dissident community, particularly some of the 1989 student leaders, who were not happy with how they were portrayed in the film. They accused the filmmakers of working for the Chinese government, denouncing them as "a pack of flies, a true disease of our era".

Some felt stung by the documentary's implication they may have erred in the final days of the confrontation with the government; that their decision to remain in Tiananmen Square may have undermined reformers in the government and contributed to more deaths when the eventual crackdown came.

In April 1995, Chai wrote an article for Beijing Spring, a leading publication for overseas dissidents, criticising the yet-to-be-released film. In a style reminiscent of communist propaganda, she wrote: "Certain individuals have for the sake of gaining approval from the [Chinese] authorities racked their brains for ways and means to come up with policies for them," she wrote. She then makes an attack apparently on Hinton. "And there is another person with a pro-communist history who has been hawking [her] documentary film for crude commercial gain by taking things out of context and trying to reveal something new, unreasonably turning history on its head and calling black white."

Among other things, Chai's anger was over the translation of a single word: qidai, which in the film is interpreted as "hoping for" .

Chai and her supporters argue that the word was mistranslated and taken out of context.

Hinton, a native speaker who was born, raised and educated at a local school in Beijing, says the word qidai can never be used when the speaker merely expects, but does not want, something to happen.

Her argument is supported by Moli, a well-known dissident now living in Sweden, who spent close to three years in prison following the 1989 incident.

"The type of wish expressed by the word qidai in Chinese is extremely clear, meaning that the speaker wants to see happen what he or she expects to happen," Moli says. "A native Chinese speaker would never useqidai for something he or she does not want to see happen."

Shortly after the film's release, however, the controversy seemed to fade.

Chai worked hard to reestablish herself in the United States. She earned an MBA from Harvard, and later married Robert Maginn, a Massachusetts businessman who she met in Boston. Together they established Jenzabar, a company that produces software for colleges, with Chai named president of the company. For the most part, however, she seemed to want to leave June 4 behind her.

In 2006, Long Bow received a phone call from Jenzabar demanding that the film company remove all the pages about Chai and Jenzabar from their website, a request that didn't sit well with the filmmakers.

"We felt that a company should not have the right to demand that a website that focuses on history remove accurate historical information," Hinton says.

"If a company can dictate this, it's not a very good situation."

In May 2007, Chai, her husband and Jenzabar launched a lawsuit against Long Bow for defamation and trademark infringement.

The suit said Long Bow had defamed the plaintiffs by quoting from and linking to negative news stories about them, which were published by major news outlets, including The Boston Globe, Forbes and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The lawsuit accused Long Bow of using the "Jenzabar" trademark as a metatag (used to index and describe content) on a webpage that reports information about the software company.

"Forbes, The Boston Globe and the Chronicle of Higher Education all had pieces that questioned Jenzabar's business practices and Forbes even used the same metatags that Long Bow is being sued for," Hinton says. "But Jenzabar is only going after us and not the big newspapers."

In its complaint, Jenzabar claimed that Long Bow was "motivated by ill will, their sympathy for officials in the Communist government of China, and a desire to discredit Chai ..." It further argued that Long Bow had a "desire to discredit Chai and advance Long Bow's divergent political agenda".

In August 2008, a Massachusetts court threw out the defamation claims saying that the posting of news articles was fully protected by the First Amendment. On the trademark issue, the court recognised that "Jenzabar seems unlikely to prevail ... because of the dissimilarity of Long Bow's business" , but it nevertheless allowed it an opportunity to prove its claims.

Hit hard by legal expenses, Long Bow in April last year posted an online appeal to the international academic community, hoping to arouse public support and find free legal help, which Hinton says was the only way the company could defend itself. More than 500 scholars and other supporters signed the appeal.

In October, Long Bow got a boost when Paul Levy of Public Citizen, a non-profit advocacy group based in Washington, offered pro bono legal representation because of the First Amendment issues raised by Jenzabar's lawsuit.

In a rambling deposition, Maginn accuses Long Bow of internet identity theft, claiming that the Long Bow site confuses Jenzabar's potential customers and that he's lost tens of millions of dollars as a result. Maginn did not cite one specific example of how he lost business due to the links on the Long Bow website. Long Bow says it's not received a single inquiry about Jenzabar software.

"Whether he's lost millions of dollars, I can't say," Levy says. "They didn't provide any evidence of such losses. They claim there's been an adverse impact on them, but have declined to prove it. And it's hard to see what the benefit is for Long Bow."

During the course of the legal battle, Jenzabar threw a series of curve balls that Hinton says were "delay tactics to clog up the process".

In May last year, Jenzabar filed to keep the lawsuit secret in an attempt to prevent Long Bow from speaking publicly about the case or from posting about it on its website. The motion was denied. Jenzabar then filed a motion to have Levy removed, arguing he had written about the case on his blog. This motion was also denied. Jenzabar also requested to keep a particular judge on the case - the request was turned down.

Hinton says Jenzabar's behaviour reinforces her belief that the lawsuit is not actually about trademarks or metatags. "Rather, the lawsuit is an effort to punish Long Bow for the documentary by using the wealth of a large corporation," she said.

"This trademark violation is just an excuse. In my opinion, they want to take The Gate of Heavenly Peace out of circulation. This is pure political persecution," she said. "To me, it's very much like the Chinese government."

At the same time, a campaign was launched last year to discredit Hinton and film.

In late May last year, Feng Congde, Chai's ex-husband and a former student leader, wrote an open letter attacking the documentary for "false reporting and editing" of her role in the 1989 movement.

Feng collected signatures from former students and prominent Chinese intellectuals, and then demanded that Long Bow post the letter on its website and correct the film's alleged errors. Long Bow wrote a detailed rebuttal and posted it on its website, together with Feng's letter. As of today, Feng has not reciprocated on his website.

Feng argues that The Gate of Heavenly Peace erroneously implies that Chai ran away on the night of June 3-4, rather than stay in the square with fellow students. In the video interview on May 28, the student leader is heard saying she will not stay in the square, but Long Bow's reply to Feng's letter quotes passages from the documentary that make it very clear that Chai did stay to the end.

Some critics see the film as a clear effort to tarnish the image of Chai, and thereby the student movement of Tiananmen.

Hinton says that some of the student leaders share the Communist Party's inability to deal with criticisms.

"They somehow have this need to have a perfect image," she says. "They can't live with flaws."

One Western scholar lashes out against the focus on student culpability, saying this is not the point.

"My distaste comes more from the controversy that has followed, which has centred on the question, `Was the massacre also partly the students' fault? Was it partly Chai Ling's fault?'

"I see this as the regime or friends of the regime - hijacking the main point," he continues. "The massacre was caused by Deng Xiaoping , Li Peng , et al, not by Chai Ling. Chai Ling has hatched a silly lawsuit, but that's a different point."

While the legal case that raged on for more than three years now appears to be coming to an end, it is unclear whether the widespread bitter debate that it generated is going to die down any time soon.

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