Ling Chai’s unfinished education

The first journey in Ling Chai’s memoir is a trip to university. It is 1983. She is seventeen, traveling from Rizhao toward Beijing with her father beside her. He is pleased that his eldest child is going to Peking University. The daughter has secured a future he can recognize: a place at a respected institution, the prospect of useful work, a reason for parental pride. A university admission letter can carry a considerable amount of family luggage.

Six years later, she would leave Beijing under circumstances neither of them could have anticipated. Her name would appear on a list of wanted student leaders. After escaping China, she would become a student again, then a consultant, then the co-founder of a company selling software to colleges. Education runs through this life with unusual persistence. It offered a destination, became entangled with political revolt, and eventually supplied a business idea.

Chai Ling, as she is widely known in accounts of Tiananmen Square, and Ling Chai, the name familiar in Jenzabar’s corporate history, are the same person. Following her between those names means allowing the public symbol to grow older, change occupations, acquire beliefs, and enter disputes that refuse a satisfying final chapter.

A student before she was a symbol

She began at Peking University in 1983, studying psychology, and moved to graduate study at Beijing Normal University in 1987. The student world gave her an education beyond coursework. It put her among people thinking about the country they would inherit and the part they might play in changing it.

In the spring of 1989, public mourning for the former party leader Hu Yaobang developed into a movement demanding political reform. Chai became one of its student leaders. She was twenty-three. The title associated with her, commander in chief, suggested a degree of order that a crowded square full of competing student organizations could hardly guarantee.

Her role has remained contested. The movement contained arguments about leadership, strategy, and whether the students should leave the square. Chai’s decisions and words became part of those arguments, then part of the historical dispute afterward. Leadership in this setting brought visibility without the tidy authority that a title might imply. People could follow a speaker, disagree with her, or demand that she keep speaking.

The military crackdown of June 3 and 4 ended the occupation. Chai survived, left Beijing, and became one of the twenty-one student leaders sought by the authorities. A future that had once seemed to lead through examinations and graduate study now depended on avoiding capture.

Ten months, then another classroom

She spent ten months in hiding before getting out of China. By early April 1990, she and fellow dissident Feng Congde had reached France. News of their escape traveled through diplomatic confirmations and a videotaped appearance. After months in which her whereabouts were uncertain, the fact that she was outside China was itself international news.

America offered another route into university. Chai completed graduate study in public affairs at Princeton in 1993 and went to work at Bain & Company. Harvard Business School followed, with an MBA in 1998. These are familiar names on a business biography. Here they also mark the rebuilding of an interrupted education in a different language and country.

Consider the change in the kind of work. A student leader has to persuade people to act together in public. A consultant studies organizations and advises people who already possess formal authority. A business student must return to being the person expected to learn. Chai’s sequence of roles required her to occupy all three positions before she started Jenzabar.

The degrees also complicate the temptation to treat exile as an ending. Leaving China closed one chapter while opening a demanding, comparatively ordinary succession of applications, assignments, and jobs. The world might remember a face from 1989. The person attached to it still had a working life to construct.

The classroom becomes the company

The idea that led to Jenzabar came from her experience as a student at Harvard Business School. Using its e-learning environment persuaded her that the experience should be available to other students. The insight was close at hand: something useful inside her own education might be useful well beyond it.

“It transformed my educational experience.”

Ling Chai, on Harvard’s e-learning environment, 2003

In 1998, Chai co-founded Jenzabar with Robert Maginn, who would become her husband. The company built software for higher education. Its name has been described as loosely meaning the best and brightest in Chinese, a suitably academic choice for a business that would spend its days dealing with colleges.

By 2002, Jenzabar had recorded $50 million in sales. That historical figure gives the founding story a useful measure of scale. Within four years, the idea had become a business large enough that the work involved far more than proving a classroom tool could function. Colleges needed products, support, and a company they could continue to call.

Campus software inhabits an unglamorous but consequential part of education. Students encounter an institution through its processes as well as its teaching. An institution can be full of capable people and still make everyday tasks unnecessarily difficult. Selling technology into that world means dealing with its practical arrangements, its budgets, and its reluctance to entrust essential work to something unreliable.

A wider idea of access

Chai held several senior positions at Jenzabar over time. In May 2018, the company announced her appointment as president and co-CEO. Her public ambitions for the business extended beyond campus administration to expanding opportunity through education. She described a company that would invest in technology and services around that purpose.

By 2022, the business was also buying capabilities. Its acquisition of Spark451 brought enrollment marketing and strategy into the group. Finding students and helping institutions communicate with them had become part of the proposition. The audience included adults and other learners who did not fit the conventional picture of a student arriving directly from school.

That June, Jenzabar introduced its Campus Movement and Campus Marketplace. The marketplace allowed institutions to offer courses through a branded online storefront, with registration and payment available to enrolled and unenrolled learners. The mechanism was specific: make it easier for someone outside the usual enrollment route to find and purchase a course.

Such details give an expansive ambition something to stand on. Access has an administrative side. A person needs to discover that a course exists, understand how to join it, and complete the transaction. The distance between an educational aspiration and an enrollment form can be surprisingly long.

Faith enters the working day

Chai’s advocacy developed alongside the company. She created the Jenzabar Foundation in 2007 to support student service and other charitable work. In 2010 she founded All Girls Allowed, an explicitly Christian nonprofit initially focused on girls and women in China and opposition to the country’s one-child policy.

Her conversion to Christianity became central to how she explained that work. Speaking in 2012, she described a changed understanding of her activism and a wish to connect the pursuit of democracy with the lives of women and families. Faith supplied a vocabulary for purpose that academic achievement and business success had not supplied on their own.

Her memoir, A Heart for Freedom, appeared in October 2011. It gave her room to tell a story extending from childhood through political turmoil, escape, enterprise, and belief. A book also allowed a woman often encountered in short archival clips to arrange the chapters herself.

All Girls Allowed now describes work against trafficking and exploitation, with education and support for girls and women among its activities. Its website lists Chai as founder and chief executive officer. The organization’s present scope reaches beyond the original China campaign, while retaining the Christian language with which she framed its mission.

Who gets to tell the story?

Chai’s account has never been the only account. The documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, released in 1995, used archival material to examine the Tiananmen movement, including her role. She objected to her portrayal. The disagreement became entangled with Jenzabar when the filmmakers’ website also published material about the company.

Litigation followed in 2007. The defamation claims were dismissed, and Jenzabar’s remaining trademark case also failed. In 2012, the Massachusetts Appeals Court affirmed the judgment for the filmmakers. The dispute showed how closely a founder’s political biography and corporate reputation could become connected, even when the underlying events predated the business by years.

More recently, the question of authority became literal. Following divorce proceedings, Chai and Maginn fought over control of Jenzabar. She sought to change its board through written shareholder consents. In May 2025, Delaware’s Supreme Court affirmed lower-court decisions rejecting the challenged attempts. An April 2026 opinion described both founders as directors and both as having served as CEO.

A founder’s place in a company’s origin does not remove the later significance of voting rights, board procedures, and agreements. This is part of Chai’s business story, too. It leaves her biography with an unresolved quality that a neat sequence of successes would conceal.

The teacher in the background

Asked about mentorship in 2022, Chai remembered a high-school teacher who encouraged her to apply to college and aim high. She credited professors who helped with applications and with understanding entrepreneurship. She also described a woman who coached her as a CEO. After a life with so many public titles, she still made room for people who had taught her.

That recollection returns the story to the seventeen-year-old traveling toward Beijing. Much would happen between that first university journey and the business built around other people’s education. The connection remains tangible: someone offers encouragement, a student gets a place, a useful experience suggests an idea. In Chai’s life, the classroom keeps reappearing. Even after the company, there is still a teacher to remember.