‘Most Wanted’ Female Dissident of China Plies New Career In Boston : Tian An Men Square: Tumultuous events in 1989 turned a promising student’s life inside out. Today, Chai Ling advises top executives on management techniques as she writes a book on her Beijing experience.

Chai Ling makes a strong first impression. The Princeton graduate is a sharp dresser, speaks English fluently and commands respect with her quick wit and steady eye contact. She also moves easily among top executives as she advises companies on management techniques.

She’ll tell you she is simply a successful young Boston businesswoman--who also happens to be the most wanted female criminal in China.

Chai was one of the first students to converge on Tian An Men Square in the spring of 1989 and one of the first to refuse food until the government agreed to talk reform with the protesters.

When the People’s Liberation Army descended on the square in June, 1989, she was among the last to leave.

Now, six years later, the 29-year-old lives quietly in Boston, concentrating on a career in business while working on a book about how one of the most promising teen-agers from the seaside town of Ri Zhao became one of China’s most wanted dissidents.

She wasn’t always a firebrand. Chai had been a model student at Beijing Normal University, where she helped found the first cafe on campus. She even waited tables and helped make the coffee.

She studied child psychology, ran track and helped organize campus workshops.

In 1982, at the age of 16, Chai was hailed by the Young Communists League as one of the country’s top 100 students.

But the events of April 15, 1989--her 23rd birthday--changed her life. That was the day former Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack.

Hu had been ousted from power two years earlier for failing to crack down on students’ pro-democracy demonstrations, so Chai and thousands of others from Beijing Normal University converged on Tian An Men Square in his honor.

Nothing was organized, she recalled. Some brought wreaths or wrote poems. Chai and others started giving speeches, calling on the government to become more democratic.

She never intended to take command of the students who flocked to Beijing from across the country. But within a month, she had been elected a commander and the occupation of Tian An Men Square had begun.

“To go demonstrate on the street in China is to take a great risk,” she said. “I had a vague idea of the danger, but I had no idea that my whole life would be turned upside down.”

When the tanks rolled in on June 4, 1989, Chai urged the crowd to hold its ground. Government troops killed hundreds of the unarmed demonstrators. Chai fled into hiding; in the aftermath, the Chinese government listed her No. 4 on their list of 21 student leaders who had eluded capture, imprisonment and even execution.

“All we wanted was a dialogue with the government,” Chai said. “Why did they do this when all we wanted was something better for the nation? I still have to question why there was a need for force, why they had to kill people.”

Chai became one of the most controversial figures of the 1989 movement. Some of her fellow activists criticized her for advocating the occupation of Tian An Men Square long after they felt it necessary, thereby increasing the chances of bloodshed.

For 10 months, Chai lived under the protection of strangers, starting with a few workers she met on a train immediately after the massacre. They knew who she was, what had happened in Beijing, and wanted to help, she said.

“It was very dangerous for them, for their families, their children. These are really the heroes. The heroes are still in China,” she said.

Chai estimates about 200 people risked their lives to smuggle her out of China. She turned up in Paris with her husband, dissident Feng Congde, in April, 1990, the same year she was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Although her husband chose to stay in France, Chai moved to the United States and resumed her graduate studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she received a master’s degree.

She now divides her time between Boston and Washington, D.C., where she runs the China Dialogue foundation, lobbying the U.S. government on policy toward China.

The United States, she says, must avoid selling out human rights in the name of economic opportunity in China.

Chai misses her homeland and her parents, brothers and sisters.

“I want them to have normal lives,” she said.