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Chen Xitong (1930–2013)

Chen Xitong rose from Beijing's grassroots administration to serve a decade as the capital's mayor, and in 1989 he was its chief civil administrator: on 24 April the report he delivered for the Beijing Municipal Party Committee first described the student protests, at the highest level of decision, as organised turmoil; on 20 May the martial-law orders were published over his name as mayor; on 30 June he read to the NPC Standing Committee the Report on Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-revolutionary Rebellion, fixing the official verdict. After the crackdown he rose into the Politburo in 1992, then fell in 1995 in the corruption case triggered by Vice Mayor Wang Baosen's suicide, and in 1998 was sentenced to 16 years for corruption and dereliction of duty alone. In conversations published in Hong Kong in 2012 he presented himself as a mere executor, said he had never been to Deng Xiaoping's home, and expressed regret at the bloodshed — a late-life account that conflicts with the contemporary archive in several places, and which this file sets out item by item without deciding it for him. He died in Beijing on 2 June 2013, two days short of the twenty-fourth anniversary of June Fourth.

Born

10 June 1930, Anyue County, Sichuan Province; entered Peking University's Chinese department in 1948; joined the Chinese Communist Party in December 1949 (expelled 29 August 1997); died of cancer in Beijing on 2 June 2013, aged 82

Career highlights

A Beijing grassroots cadre who rose through a police substation deputy post, service as secretary to Beijing's second Party secretary Liu Ren, a factory workshop Party branch, and the Changping county Party secretaryship; vice mayor of Beijing from 1979; member of the 12th Central Committee from 1982; Mayor of Beijing from April 1983 to early 1993, concurrently a State Councillor from April 1988; member of the Politburo from October 1992 and Beijing Party secretary from late 1992 until his fall in 1995

Beijing tenure and responsibility

Mayor of Beijing and State Councillor during the 1989 Tiananmen protests — the capital's chief civil administrator. On 24 April 1989 he and Beijing Party secretary Li Ximing reported to the Politburo Standing Committee for the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, characterising the student protests as a planned and organised turmoil; that report fed directly into the framing of the 26 April People's Daily editorial. On 20 May 1989 the Beijing orders accompanying martial law were issued over his name as mayor (the martial-law decision itself was made by the State Council). On 30 June 1989, commissioned by the State Council, he delivered to the eighth session of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress the Report on Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-revolutionary Rebellion, becoming the reader and signatory of the Party's official verdict on the June Fourth events

Signature events

The 24 April 1989 report and its place in the chain leading to the 26 April editorial; the martial-law orders published over his name on 20 May 1989; the 30 June 1989 report to the NPC Standing Committee, which labelled the protests a counter-revolutionary rebellion, assigned blame to Zhao Ziyang and foreign forces, and put the number of injured at about 6,000; promotion after the crackdown to Beijing Party secretary and the Politburo in 1992; his fall in 1995 in the case triggered by Vice Mayor Wang Baosen's suicide — the first Politburo member of the reform era to be jailed for corruption; his 2012 Hong Kong-published Conversations with Chen Xitong, in which he presented himself as a mere executor and puppet in 1989, said he had never been to Deng Xiaoping's home, and expressed regret at the bloodshed — a late-life account that conflicts with several contemporary records and is presented in this file as contested (see Section 13)

Sanctions

No public sanctions record. As of this file's checking, no designation of Chen Xitong personally was found on the publicly released sanctions lists of the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom or Canada. He died in 2013, and no foreign government is recorded as having sanctioned him personally for his 1989 role (see Section 14)

Current status

Deceased. He died in Beijing on 2 June 2013; Xinhua issued a brief report. Public sources give two different years, 2004 and 2006, for his medical parole; this file records both and adopts neither (see Section 12). No official body has ever investigated or reassessed his 1989 responsibility; the offences in his 1998 conviction were corruption and dereliction of duty only, unconnected with his policy responsibility in 1989

1. Anyue origins and Peking University: a grassroots cadre's starting point

Chen Xitong was born on 10 June 1930 in Anyue County, Sichuan. In 1948, aged eighteen, he entered the Chinese department of Peking University. In December 1949 he joined the Chinese Communist Party. Read together, those three lines show how he differed from many officials of his later rank: no army background, no Soviet training, no prominent family. His entrance into the system of power was the lowest layer of the new regime's takeover of Beijing — neighbourhood committees, a police substation, a factory workshop.

In the first years of the People's Republic in Beijing he worked successively on a Xidan neighbourhood work team, as deputy head of the Twelfth Police Substation of the Inner City Second Branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, and in personnel and clerical posts. In 1952 he moved into the office of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, and from 1953 he served as secretary to Liu Ren, the committee's second secretary. Liu was a senior deputy in Peng Zhen's Beijing; the secretaryship was the most important political capital of Chen's early life, and it also shaped his later fate: in the Cultural Revolution he was sent down to manual labour precisely because of that old municipal-committee connection, and for a time was made to clean toilets. Public biographies are broadly consistent on this outline, though the detail comes largely from who's-who reference works, and this file cites it in those terms.

Before and after the secretary years he spent roughly a decade as Party branch secretary of the Seventh Workshop of the Beijing No. 1 Machine Tool Plant, living through the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the rest of that sequence. In 1963 he moved to Changping, as deputy head of the county's agriculture and industry department and then deputy county Party secretary. To understand Chen, begin with the shape of this career: he never left Beijing's administrative system, and he climbed it rung by rung from the very bottom for more than thirty years. For a man like that, loyalty to the organisation was not abstract. His career, his housing, his children's futures all hung on the system. When, in the spring of 1989, that system required the mayor of the capital to step forward, fix the label, sign the orders and read the report, what he did was, in its logic, the same thing he had done for the previous thirty-nine years: he executed.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (Chinese and English versions: birth, Peking University Chinese department, Party membership in December 1949, grassroots career, the Liu Ren secretaryship); Wolfgang Bartke, Who's Who in the People's Republic of China (reference-work account).

2. From Changping back to the municipal government: rehabilitation in 1971 and the turn of 1979

In 1971 Chen resurfaced in Changping, serving in turn as deputy director of the Shisanling Commune revolutionary committee, Party secretary of Machikou Commune, deputy county Party secretary, deputy director of the county revolutionary committee, and finally Changping county Party secretary and director of its revolutionary committee. In August 1979, writing as Changping Party secretary, he published a signed article in the People's Daily, "Discussing the Criterion of Truth Is an Important Lesson", coming down publicly on the side of the great debate over whether practice is the sole criterion of truth. The timing mattered: Deng Xiaoping, newly restored, was pushing ideological emancipation, and a county Party secretary declaring himself promptly in the Party newspaper was handing the new centre a token of political allegiance. Several biographical accounts treat that article as the turning point of his career and his early support for Deng as the direct reason he was brought back into the Beijing municipal system in 1979.

In November (some accounts say December) 1979 he was elected a vice mayor of Beijing. In 1981 he entered the standing committee of the municipal Party committee, and in 1982 the Twelfth Party Congress elected him to the Central Committee. In April 1983 he succeeded Jiao Ruoyu as Mayor of Beijing (the Chinese Wikipedia dates the mayoralty from 24 March 1983 to 5 February 1993, the English Wikipedia from April 1983 to January 1993; the start and end months differ between them, and this file uses "1983 to early 1993"). In April 1988 he also became a State Councillor, entering the leadership of the State Council. From 1987 he was also a deputy secretary of the Beijing Party Committee, running the capital in tandem with Party secretary Li Ximing.

Across a decade as mayor he administered a capital in rapid expansion: preparation for the Asian Games, urban construction, the inflow of foreign investment, the fortieth-anniversary National Day celebrations. He led friendship delegations abroad many times. In the public reporting of those years he appears as a capable, forceful local administrator. Protesters in 1989 accused him of a luxurious lifestyle and of sheltering corruption; at his May 1989 meeting with students he said on the spot that "we have made some mistakes", and offered that he and Li Ximing would disclose their assets. That exchange is recorded in several contemporary reports and scholarly works; this file records it as it stands, and notes alongside it that the meeting produced no substantive agreement and that no disclosure of assets ever actually took place.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (Chinese and English versions: the 1979 signed article, the vice mayoralty, the mayoralty and State Councillor dates, with differing months between versions); the May 1989 dialogue as recounted in contemporary scholarship (Ogden et al.; Chai Ling's memoir — secondhand accounts).

3. April 1989: the report that called the student movement "turmoil"

On 15 April 1989 the former General Secretary Hu Yaobang died, and Beijing students took to the streets in mourning; their demands quickly widened to press freedom, disclosure of officials' assets and action against corruption. On 22 April, the day of Hu's funeral, students knelt for a long time outside the Great Hall of the People asking to be received by Premier Li Peng; they were not received. Chen later blamed lower officials for leading the students to expect such a reception. On 23 April he called a meeting of the presidents of Beijing universities, rebuked them for passivity and told them to gather information on the protests. The same day, he and Li Ximing persuaded Wan Li, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, to convene a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee devoted to the student protests.

On 24 April 1989 Li Peng chaired that Standing Committee meeting, at which Chen Xitong and Li Ximing delivered a formal report on behalf of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee. According to the account in Zhao Ziyang's memoir — an account cited by many scholarly works — the two men presented the student protests as a planned and organised action, stressed that protests were occurring simultaneously in many parts of the country, that secondary-school students and workers were now among the participants, that the movement was growing, and they drew particular attention to words and slogans aimed at Deng Xiaoping personally. Li Peng then briefed Deng, who responded that this was no ordinary student movement. On 26 April the People's Daily published the editorial that defined the movement as "turmoil created by an extremely small number of people" — the famous 26 April editorial. Its language derived mainly from Deng's reaction to Li Peng's briefing, and one of the sources upstream of that briefing was the Beijing committee's report of 24 April.

This is the first link in the chain of Chen's 1989 responsibility, and the one scholars discuss most. The East Asian studies scholar Ezra Vogel has argued that Chen exaggerated the danger of the initial protests in the 24 April report, and that the exaggeration set off the domino chain that ended in the crackdown. Motives suggested in the scholarship include a mayor's fear of being held responsible if protests continued in his own jurisdiction — say the danger in full, and push the Standing Committee to act harshly at once — and, in the reading of Ogden and others, the calculation of a second generation of hardliners who kept a hard line in step with the Party elders in hope of promotion once Zhao Ziyang's people were pushed out. These are scholarly analyses and inferences, not the text of meeting minutes, and this file cites them as analysis, not as established fact. The report itself, the direction of its characterisation, and its place in the chain leading to the 26 April editorial are supported across Zhao's memoir, the circulated text of Li Peng's diary and multiple scholarly works, and can be recorded as archival fact: the first formal report at the highest level of decision that described the student protests as organised turmoil was delivered in the name of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, and one of the two men who stood up to deliver it was Mayor Chen Xitong.

Sources: Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State, as cited in Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (the meetings of 23 and 24 April and the content of the report); Ezra Vogel's analysis of the exaggeration in the 24 April report (as cited in scholarly discussion reproduced on Wikipedia); Ogden et al. on hardliner motives (scholarly inference).

4. Early May: open confrontation with Zhao Ziyang in the Standing Committee

After the 26 April editorial the protests grew rather than shrank. On 27 April students broke through police lines repeatedly to reach Tiananmen Square. On 30 April Chen and Li Ximing received the officially recognised Beijing College Students' Association — not the protesting students' own organisations. That pattern, dialogue only with official bodies, became the authorities' fixed method for the rest of the crisis. The Beijing municipal government then announced stricter limits on demonstrations, which the protesters simply ignored; Zhao Ziyang later described those limits in his memoir as a piece of waste paper.

At the Standing Committee meeting of 1 May, according to Zhao's memoir, Chen, speaking for the Beijing committee, accused the Standing Committee itself of betrayal — in substance, that the centre's line was inconsistent and retreating, and Beijing's work impossible to carry out. On 4 May Zhao gave a conciliatory speech at the Asian Development Bank meeting, proposing that the issues be resolved on the track of democracy and law. On 8 May Chen accused Zhao of betraying the Standing Committee's position in that speech. Whether Zhao's speech had Deng's or the Standing Committee's prior approval later became a central dispute. Materials in the Tiananmen Papers tradition indicate that Zhao had circulated a draft of the speech at an expanded Standing Committee meeting on 1 May, and that Chen himself was among those present. Yet Chen's report of 30 June 1989 charged Zhao with delivering the speech without approval. One and the same episode was used by the Chen of 1989 to convict Zhao, while the surviving materials show a more complicated record of circulation. That is exactly why this file insists that every accusation in the 30 June report be read as one party's version, never as a neutral record.

On 13 May, with the welcoming ceremony for Gorbachev's Sino-Soviet summit unable to be held in Tiananmen Square, students began a hunger strike in the Square. Zhao assigned Chen, Li Ximing and others to a delegation to meet the students there. In the meeting, students accused Chen of living extravagantly; he replied that "we have made some mistakes", and offered to disclose his assets, and Li's, to clear themselves of the corruption charges. No agreement of any kind was reached. On 18 May student representatives met Li Peng in the Great Hall of the People; what Chen emphasised at that meeting was the trouble the protests had caused Beijing's traffic and production. The remark was recorded by several contemporary reports, and it captures his position at that moment: in his eyes the people in the Square were first of all a problem of capital administration, and only secondarily a political question — and within a week the word "trouble" would be replaced by "counter-revolutionary rebellion".

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (the 30 April reception, the statements of 1 and 8 May, the 13 May meeting in the Square, the 18 May meeting — citing Zhao's memoir and contemporary reporting); the US National Security Archive's analysis of the Tiananmen Papers and the circulation of Zhao's speech draft.

5. Martial law: what he signed, and what he did not

The layer of office. On the evening of 19 May 1989 Li Peng announced on television that martial law would be imposed in parts of the capital. On 20 May the State Council issued the order imposing martial law in parts of Beijing, and martial law took effect; the same day, Beijing's accompanying orders banning demonstrations and strikes were published signed by Chen Xitong as mayor. The decision for martial law was made at the level of the State Council and the Central Military Commission; no mayor could have made it. But the administrative face of martial law in Beijing was the mayor's. After the orders were published, still more citizens came out in support of the students and blocked the approaches into the city, and for a time the troops could not carry out the order to clear the Square. These are established public facts on which all accounts agree.

The layer of others' accounts. According to the entry for 18 May in Li Peng's unpublished diary The Critical Moment, at the meeting that decided the next course of action Chen was put in charge of carrying out the martial-law order, assisted by a military general. The diary has never been officially published, and the authenticity of its circulated text is debated among scholars; this file cites it as "the account in the circulated text of Li Peng's diary" and flags its unpublished status. Relatedly, the June Fourth researcher Wu Renhua and others, working from the recollections of martial-law troops, have shown that units opened fire only after receiving orders, and that internal military writings repeatedly record firing under orders. Those materials point to the military chain of command, not to Chen personally, and this file does not assign the order to open fire to him: no public archive document proves that Chen Xitong issued any order to open fire, and this file states that plainly.

The layer of his own account. In Conversations with Chen Xitong, Chen said he was puzzled by the claim that he had been in charge of the crackdown of 3–4 June, and that he had known nothing of it until Li Peng's diary surfaced in 2010. Wu Guoguang, who wrote the book's foreword, considered it plausible, given the chaos of those days, that Chen had not been informed in advance of his role in the clearance. Whether that defence holds is not settled in the scholarship. But one thing does not change with his account: the administrative orders of martial law in Beijing carried his signature; the cooperation of the Beijing municipal system during martial law, and the arrests and wanted lists at the municipal level afterwards, all happened during his mayoralty. This file's attribution stops at that layer: he was martial law's chief administrative executor and public spokesman in the capital. Whether he sat inside the military chain of command for the clearance, and whether he knew in advance, are matters for which no public archival proof exists; he denied it in old age, and this file records both.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (the martial-law orders signed in his name on 20 May, citing the published texts of the time; the 18 May entry of Li Peng's The Critical Moment — unpublished diary); Wu Renhua's research and the China Change Q&A of 4 June 2018 on troops firing under orders (pointing to the military chain of command); Conversations with Chen Xitong (2012), his denial, and Wu Guoguang's foreword.

6. 1–2 June: the two most contested days

On 1 June, Children's Day, Xinhua reported Chen telling an audience at a celebration attended by 20,000 children not to worry about the protests, and that they would very soon have access to Tiananmen Square again. The sentence has been quoted ever since, because forty-eight hours after he said it the Square was indeed "reopened" — by being cleared. Whether he already knew of the clearance decision at the time is a matter of no public record; this file makes no inference and records only the sequence itself.

On 2 June, several accounts say, Chen and Li Ximing went together to Deng Xiaoping's home and reported, portraying the protests as part of an international plot to derail China's progress. This episode circulates very widely in narratives of the June Fourth decision, and it is one of the main supports for the claim that Chen and Li finally pushed Deng into deciding on the clearance. But in Conversations with Chen Xitong, Chen expressly denied it: he said he had never been to Deng Xiaoping's home. Neither side has produced a contemporaneous document open to public checking. This file therefore labels the "report of 2 June" as the common account of several secondhand narratives, and "never went to Deng's home" as the denial of the man himself in old age, sets them side by side, and decides neither. It also records that Chen's 1989 responsibility does not rest on this single contested episode: the Beijing committee's report of 24 April, which first characterised the movement as organised turmoil, is real, and is cross-supported by memoir and scholarship.

On the night of 3 June into the early hours of 4 June, martial-law troops advanced on Tiananmen Square and carried out the clearance, opening fire on citizens blocking their way around West Chang'an Avenue, Xidan, Muxidi and Fuxingmen, causing heavy civilian deaths. There is still no exact death toll. The official figure was about 300, soldiers included. On 6 June State Council spokesman Yuan Mu said preliminary tallies showed about 300 dead, among them 23 Beijing university students. On 19 June Li Ximing reported to the Politburo a government-confirmed toll of 241 dead — 218 civilians, of whom 36 were students, 10 PLA soldiers and 13 People's Armed Police — with about 7,000 wounded. Western diplomatic and intelligence estimates ranged from more than 700 to several thousand. A British diplomatic cable declassified in 2017 carried a source's far higher figure whose reliability scholars dispute. This file sets the figures side by side and adopts none of them singly. In his 2012 conversations Chen denied that thousands had died in Tiananmen Square, calling that nonsense, while stressing that PLA soldiers too had been killed and burned. The first half matches the official line; the second half is also part of the factual record. This file records both.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" and "1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre" (the Children's Day remark of 1 June; the 2 June report account; the range of death-toll figures, including Yuan Mu's 6 June press conference and Li Ximing's 19 June Politburo report); Conversations with Chen Xitong, on never having been to Deng's home (his own account).

7. After the clearance: the statement of 5 June and the absent face

After the clearance, Chen was among the first senior CCP officials to issue an official statement on the events, around 5 June. But the statement did not appear on television: it was released as a text, and he did not appear in person. James Miles, the BBC's Beijing correspondent at the time, later commented that his failure to appear in person to stand behind the statement was itself a sign of the Party's political uncertainty after the crackdown. That is a journalist's observation, and this file cites it as such. It does, though, point to a feature running through Chen's whole 1989 role: he was one of the most important authors and the designated reader of the official narrative, yet he almost never stood in front of a camera for it. The documents carried his name, the report issued from his mouth, and the face stayed backstage.

After 5 June Beijing entered its phase of arrests, wanted lists and purges. Wanted notices at the municipal level, workplace investigations and the rectification of the media were all carried out during his mayoralty. For years afterwards the Beijing municipal government he led maintained the official account of martial law and the clearance in public, and it was not until 7 March 1990 that he again invited foreign news organisations to his press conferences. These are facts of the office timeline. At the personal level, the public archive of what he did and signed, day by day, in the first weeks after the clearance is extremely thin, and this file records it as such: apart from the report of 30 June, no public archive of his personal activity in June 1989, day by day, is available.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (the statement around 5 June, the absence of a television appearance, James Miles's comment, the press conference of 7 March 1990 — citing the BBC and contemporary reporting).

8. The report of 30 June: how a verdict came to carry his name

On 30 June 1989, at the eighth session of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress, Chen Xitong, as State Councillor and Mayor of Beijing, commissioned by the State Council, delivered the Report on Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-revolutionary Rebellion. It was the CCP's first official verdict on the events of 1989, and the one it has never revised in the decades since. The English edition published the same year (Report on Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-revolutionary Rebellion, New Star Publishers) makes the purpose plain in its presentation: the report was to nail down, in the NPC Standing Committee, the official account of the nature, course and responsibility of the events, once and for all.

Its main contents were these: the protests from mid-April to early June were characterised as a whole as a planned, organised and premeditated political turmoil made by an extremely small number of people out of the student unrest, developing into a counter-revolutionary rebellion whose purpose was to overthrow CCP leadership and subvert the socialist system; Zhao Ziyang was accused of the grave mistake of supporting the turmoil and splitting the Party, bearing unshirkable responsibility for its formation and development; the Economics Weekly, run by Chen Ziming's institute, was accused of protecting Zhao, plotting to overthrow Deng and preaching bourgeois liberalisation — the paper was closed after the crackdown; anti-socialist actors from Hong Kong were accused of supplying the protesters with weapons and money, and Liu Xiaobo of colluding with dissidents in New York; the martial-law troops were said to have been forced, after repeated warnings, heavy casualties and endurance pressed to its limit, to fire warning shots under orders and then counterattack in self-defence; and the number of injured was put at about 6,000. The report's centre of gravity lay less with the officially designated "black hands", Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, than with Zhao Ziyang and foreign forces. It was at once a document that fixed the nature of the events and a document that sealed a verdict on an inner-Party struggle.

The report has been quoted in China scholarship for more than thirty years. Robin Munro's 1991 study of the trials of the "black hands" opens with words from it — to win thorough victory, mobilise the masses completely, strengthen the people's democratic dictatorship, spare no effort to ferret out the counter-revolutionary rioters — from Chen Xitong's report of 30 June 1989. Those words provided the political frame for the trials, held from late 1990 into early 1991, of several dozen movement leaders, who received sentences of two to thirteen years. The US National Security Archive's analysis of the Tiananmen Papers also notes that Chen's report charged Zhao with delivering his 4 May Asian Development Bank speech without Deng's or the Party's approval, while the documentary materials indicate that Zhao had at least circulated a draft at the expanded Standing Committee meeting of 1 May, at which Chen himself was present. That crack between accusation and material is the caution with which this report has to be read.

Was the report, then, written by Chen? In Conversations with Chen Xitong he said he had never taken part in drafting it, and had only been chosen to read it. Notably, that claim is corroborated from a hostile direction: according to the 18 June entry in the circulated text of Li Peng's diary, Li Peng and Jiang Zemin, at a Standing Committee meeting, selected Chen to read the report even though he had not attended the drafting meeting. Two mutually hostile accounts agree, unusually, on this point. This file therefore records: the report was very probably not drafted by him — but it was read by him, signed by him, and became the official text in his voice. In the documentary tradition of Chinese politics, the reader is one of the responsible parties. In old age he could say he merely read a script. The man who sat in the NPC Standing Committee on 30 June 1989 and read the words "counter-revolutionary rebellion" out to the world was, in fact, the Mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong. That does not change because someone else held the pen.

Sources: the English edition of Chen Xitong's report of 30 June 1989 (New Star Publishers, Beijing, 1989), its publishing presentation and text; Robin Munro, "Rough Justice in Beijing", UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, 1991 (quoting the report; the trials of 1991); the National Security Archive's Tiananmen Papers analysis (the circulation of Zhao's speech draft versus the report's accusation); Conversations with Chen Xitong and the 18 June entry of Li Peng's diary (the division between drafting and reading, corroborating each other).

9. Promotion after the crackdown: Beijing Party secretary and the Politburo, 1992

In the first two years after the crackdown Chen's position was not secure. The political scientist Joseph Fewsmith has argued that Chen was at one point among the candidates to succeed Zhao Ziyang, but that Deng considered his public hardline face in the Tiananmen events too conspicuous for the General Secretaryship; Jiang Zemin, by contrast, had won the elders' regard in Shanghai by getting workers to clear the roadblocks and the students dispersed. That is a scholar's political analysis, and this file cites it as such.

His loyalty was in the end rewarded with promotion. Scholarly accounts describe Chen being selected as successor after Li Ximing fell from favour for his reservations about Deng's economic reform line (some say in 1991, others tie it to 1992). The formal timeline is: at the Fourteenth Party Congress in October 1992 he was elected to the Politburo; from December 1992 (the English Wikipedia gives October 1992) he served as secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, succeeding Li Ximing. The Chinese and English public biographies differ by two months on the month he became Party secretary; this file says "late 1992" and notes the discrepancy here. He now held at once the capital's top Party and government posts and a Politburo seat — among the heaviest of regional power-holders, and widely described at the time as the core of a "Beijing clique". His tension with the new General Secretary Jiang Zemin was an open secret from this period; the New York Times' May 1995 reporting on China's power struggle is a contemporary record of that relationship.

What deserves filing is the logic of the promotion. The man who in 1989 had stood furthest forward and spoken in the most absolute terms faced no internal reckoning of any kind for the crackdown; three years later he entered the Politburo. The Party's internal handling of June Fourth responsibility has only ever run in one direction: those investigated were the waverers and the losers, never those who carried out the suppression. Nor, when Chen fell later, was it because of 1989. That is the premise for the next section.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (Chinese and English versions: Fewsmith's analysis; the Politburo membership and Party secretary appointment of 1992, with differing months between versions); New York Times, 10 May 1995, on China's power struggle.

10. Wang Baosen's suicide and the fall of 1995: it was never about 1989

On 4 April 1995 Wang Baosen, executive vice mayor of Beijing, shot himself in the suburbs of Huairou, shortly before investigators of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection were due to interview him. Wang was Chen's long-standing close associate, serving as vice mayor and head of the Beijing Municipal Finance Bureau. The Wuxi Xinxing company's illegal fund-raising scheme had already collapsed, and investigators had found that Wang had placed US$12 million of Beijing municipal government money into it; there were further allegations that he and Chen had used several million US dollars of public funds to build luxury villas for their own use. The figures differ considerably between sources, and this file records only what at least two sources jointly support: Wang killed himself, and his death was directly connected to the investigation of his handling of public money.

Twenty-two days after Wang's death (one account says twenty-three), on 27 April 1995, Chen resigned, taking bureaucratic responsibility for Wang's problems — in most accounts, resigning as Beijing Party secretary and from his other posts. On 28 September 1995 the Fifth Plenary Session of the Fourteenth Central Committee considered and adopted the discipline commission's review report on Chen, deciding to remove him as a member of the Politburo and of the Central Committee, to recommend his removal as an NPC deputy through legal process, and to continue the examination of his case. He thus became the first Politburo member of the reform era to be removed and investigated. His son (named Chen Xiaotong in most reporting) was also sentenced, to twelve years, for bribery, according to the English Wikipedia article; the son's name appears in variant written forms in different sources, and this file follows the English Wikipedia's rendering while noting the variants.

On the reasons for the fall, observers and scholars agree more than they differ: it was the outcome of a power struggle. Jiang Zemin had come from Shanghai to Beijing after 1989 with a General Secretaryship that was at first insecure, and Chen's "Beijing clique" was widely seen as a challenge to his authority; as Deng's health declined, Jiang struck first. Reuters, the Associated Press and the New York Times at the time, and much later scholarship, worked within that frame. A US Embassy Beijing cable of 2006, later published by WikiLeaks, likewise recorded that several Beijing sources regarded the charges against Chen as politicised. This file's position is stated plainly: the power-struggle account is the mainstream analysis, supported by contemporary reporting and by a diplomatic cable; the corruption charges themselves rest on a court judgment. The two do not exclude each other — an official can both really have taken money and have been investigated precisely because of a power struggle. What the archive must record is that in the entire accounting of Chen's fall, the year 1989 never appeared as an item.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Wang Baosen" (the suicide of 4 April 1995; the US$12 million placed with Wuxi Xinxing; Chen's resignation 22 days after Wang's death; the Beijing clique versus Shanghai clique frame); Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (Chinese version: the Fifth Plenary Session decision of 28 September 1995); US Embassy cable 06BEIJING20360, published by WikiLeaks (September 2006: Beijing sources regarding the charges as politicised — diplomatic reporting).

11. Expulsion and the 1998 sentence: thirteen years for corruption, three for dereliction

On 29 August 1997, following the discipline commission's review, Chen was expelled from the Party. On 31 July 1998 the Beijing Higher People's Court gave its first-instance judgment: Chen Xitong was guilty of corruption and of dereliction of duty, and was sentenced to sixteen years in prison. According to the judgment points reproduced in the Japanese Wikipedia, the court found that between 1991 and 1994, as mayor and Party secretary of Beijing, he had accepted valuable gifts worth 555,000 yuan from enterprises, and had used 35.21 million yuan of public funds on the unlawful construction of luxury villas. A separate English analysis (a commentary carried by Probe International) described the corruption limb of the case file as 22 gifts worth something over 100,000 yuan in total during his time in office — watches, pens, cameras, mainly from Hong Kong business connections — and the dereliction limb as the overspending on the construction and running of two luxury mansions. Retellings of the amounts differ markedly between sources, from gifts of just over 100,000 yuan, to 35.21 million yuan of public money for villas, to far larger figures circulating in overseas rumour. This file records side by side only the figures that carry a source, and states expressly that the huge sums in circulation (such as a supposed US$2.2 billion) are supported by no reliable source and are not adopted.

He was among the most senior officials jailed for corruption since the founding of the People's Republic, and the first Politburo member sentenced since the Gang of Four in 1981 (in most accounts, the first Politburo member jailed for corruption in the post-Cultural Revolution era). His sixteen years became for a time the benchmark sentence in cases of the kind. After judgment he was held in Qincheng Prison. His son was sentenced to twelve years. The novelist Chen Fang's novel Heaven's Wrath, modelled on the case, was published in 1996 (some accounts say 1997), sold in large numbers, and was then banned by the authorities for leaking state secrets — whereupon pirated copies circulated still more widely. The book's existence itself measures the shock the case gave Chinese society in the 1990s.

This section must end by returning to the file's subject. In the 1998 judgment the offences were corruption and dereliction of duty, and the sums were gifts of some hundreds of thousands of yuan and villas of some tens of millions. The report he signed on 30 June 1989, the martial-law orders published in his name on 20 May 1989, and the framing report of 24 April 1989 appear in no judicial document of any kind. That is not an oversight; it is the system's consistent practice. If an executor of a suppression falls, he can only fall for money — because to pursue policy responsibility would extend the chain of pursuit upward to the entire highest level that made the decisions. Chen's sixteen years bought out precisely that chain.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (Chinese version: expulsion on 29 August 1997; the Beijing Higher People's Court sentence of sixteen years on 31 July 1998); Japanese Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (reproducing the judgment points: gifts worth 555,000 yuan; 35.21 million yuan of public funds for villas); Probe International, 11 March 2004 (the 22-gifts account of the case file — a commentary source); Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (English version: his son's twelve-year sentence; the publication and banning of Heaven's Wrath).

12. Which year was the medical parole: 2004 or 2006?

The date Chen left Qincheng Prison is given in public sources in two mutually conflicting years, and this file does not evade the conflict; it sets both out. The first version is 2004: the English Wikipedia article on Chen states that he left Qincheng Prison in 2004 on probation, officially for reasons of ill health, and Agence France-Presse's May 2012 report on Conversations with Chen Xitong likewise says he won medical parole in 2004. The second version is 2006: several timelines of fallen leaders (the "China's Fallen Mighty" series) state that he was granted medical parole in 2006 after serving eight years; the Japanese Wikipedia records Hong Kong press reports of July 2006 that he had been released for cancer treatment; and the US Embassy cable published by WikiLeaks (25 September 2006) records that several Beijing sources had by then confirmed that Chen had been paroled for medical reasons and was living quietly at his home in Beijing under guard.

A possible reconciliation is that he first left Qincheng in 2004 into some form of outside-prison or hospital custody, and that formal medical parole and the move home were completed only in 2006 — but that is conjecture, and no official document is publicly available. This file's finding is narrower: it is certain that before September 2006 he had already left prison and was spending his remaining years at home or in hospital in Beijing, supported by a contemporaneous diplomatic record; the exact year of the formal medical-parole procedure, 2004 or 2006, stands unresolved between the two versions and is recorded as unverified. In December 2009 the Yangcheng Evening News reported that he had terminal cancer and was being treated in hospital. After that he lived in seclusion, until the book of 2012 appeared.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (English version) and AFP, 29 May 2012 (the 2004 version); the "China's Fallen Mighty" timelines and Japanese Wikipedia (the 2006 version); US Embassy cable 06BEIJING20360, 25 September 2006 (already paroled and living at home — diplomatic reporting); Yangcheng Evening News, December 2009 (terminal cancer, in hospital — as cited by Japanese Wikipedia).

13. Conversations with Chen Xitong: how the self-defence of 2012 should be read

In June 2012, on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of June Fourth, New Century Press in Hong Kong published Conversations with Chen Xitong (in Chinese, Chen Xitong Qianshu), written by Yao Jianfu, a retired Xinhua journalist, from eight interviews with Chen conducted between January 2011 and April 2012, with a foreword by the scholar Wu Guoguang. AFP, the Guardian and the South China Morning Post all reported the book in the days just before publication, around 29 May 2012, under near-identical headlines: the former Beijing mayor was "sorry" for the Tiananmen crackdown. That the book was timed to appear days before the June Fourth anniversary was itself a statement.

Chen's core claims in the book are five. First, he said he was "sorry" about the events of 4 June 1989 — that "nobody should have died in the June 4 incident if it was handled properly", that "I could not do anything, very sorry", and that he believed the truth of the 1989 episode would one day be uncovered. Second, he denied that he had been a key hardliner who pushed for the use of force and misled Deng Xiaoping by exaggerating the protests to win authorisation for the army; he said he had never been to Deng's home (see Section 6). Third, he said it was mainly Li Ximing who had fed him false information about the student protests — shifting a considerable part of the responsibility for April's framing onto Li, who had died years earlier and could not answer. Fourth, he said the report of 30 June 1989 had not been drafted by him; he had only been chosen to read it (a point corroborated by Li Peng's diary — see Section 8). Fifth, on the execution of martial law, he said he had known nothing of any designation of himself to carry it out until Li Peng's diary surfaced in 2010 (see Section 5). Of his own corruption case he said it was "the biggest case of injustice involving a high-level leader since the Cultural Revolution, or since 1989 — an absurd miscarriage of justice".

The book must not, though, be read simply as a confession. Contemporary reporting records the parts of him that had not changed: he was reported as describing himself as a staunch communist whose basic attitude then, unchanged since, was opposition to turmoil; he denied that thousands had died in Tiananmen Square, calling that nonsense; and he stressed repeatedly that PLA soldiers too had been killed and burned. In other words, what he regretted was the outcome — that people died; what he disowned was the responsibility — that the orders and the decisions were his; and what he kept was the characterisation — that it had been a turmoil which had to be opposed. The three layers have to be kept apart. The regret is a genuine record of feeling. The disowning is a self-defence that conflicts with the contemporary archive. And the retained characterisation shows that to his death he never disowned the foundations of the official narrative of 1989 — the very narrative whose fixing text he himself had read aloud on 30 June 1989.

This file's general rule for the book is: it is a party's late-life account; it is source material, not a verdict. Where it conflicts with the archive (as on whether he went to Deng's home on 2 June), both versions stand side by side. Where a hostile source corroborates it (as on the division between drafting and reading the report), it can be accepted as relatively strong supporting evidence. The emotional information it carries — the word "sorry" — is recorded as it stands, but is not inflated into repentance or apology: he never apologised to the victims' families, never called for June Fourth to be rehabilitated, and never loosened the verdict of "quelling the rebellion" by a single word. That the signatory of a suppression should say, twenty-three years later, that no one should have died, is a sentence the archive should keep — together with the full boundary of that sentence.

Sources: AFP, 29 May 2012 (the expressions of regret, the eight interviews, Yao Jianfu, the publication arrangements for Conversations with Chen Xitong); the Guardian, 29 May 2012 (Tania Branigan: "Tiananmen crackdown was a tragedy, says former Beijing mayor"); Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong", compiling the book (never at Deng's home; the claim that Li Ximing misled him; no part in drafting; Wu Guoguang's foreword; the denial that thousands died in the Square; the staunch-communist reporting); the book's basis in interviews by the retired Xinhua journalist Yao Jianfu (via AFP).

14. Sanctions check: no public sanctions record

Under this site's standard headings for people files, this section checks whether Chen was formally sanctioned by a foreign government. The finding is: no public sanctions record. As of this file's checking, no formal designation of Chen Xitong personally was found in the public lists of the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), of the European Union or the United Kingdom, or among Canada's designations under its Magnitsky law. He died in 2013, after which no procedural space for new personal designations exists.

A different kind of fact must be distinguished from that finding. After the June Fourth crackdown of 1989, the United States and the European Community (the EU's predecessor) imposed measures against China as a state, including arms embargoes; the EU arms embargo on China nominally remains in force. Those are measures against a state, not a personal designation of Chen Xitong. As for judicial accountability abroad: unlike some figures connected with June Fourth who faced civil suits overseas, this file found no checkable mainstream reporting of a case against Chen personally in a foreign court proceeding to any stage, and records that as no public record. No judicial proceeding in any country has ever addressed his personal responsibility for the 1989 crackdown; the only accountability for corruption was the Chinese court's judgment of 1998.

Sources: checking of the public sanctions lists of OFAC, the EU, the UK and the Canadian government (as of October 2026: no personal designation of Chen found); the post-1989 US and European arms embargoes on China as public historical fact (state measures, not personal sanctions).

15. Death and aftermath: 2 June 2013, two days short of the twenty-fourth anniversary

On 2 June 2013 Chen Xitong died of cancer in Beijing, aged 82 (one English list gives his age at death as 84 in error; from a birth date of 10 June 1930 and a death date of 2 June 2013 the age is 82, and this file uses 82). Xinhua carried a brief report of his death. The New York Times published an obituary on 5 June 2013, by Chris Buckley, under a headline that stated his identity directly: Chen Xitong, Beijing mayor during the Tiananmen protests, dies at 82. BBC Chinese published a feature on 6 June 2013 under the title "A Key Figure of the June Fourth Incident: Chen Xitong". The day he died fell two days short of the twenty-fourth anniversary of June Fourth; counted from the 1998 judgment, his sixteen-year sentence had less than two months left to run.

After his death there was no softening of any kind in the official assessment of him: no honorific rehabilitation at his funeral, no reassessment of his 1989 role, no restoration of his Party membership. He left as what the system had made him — a corrupt official expelled from the Party. Outside the official narrative, his name survives in two places. One is the text of the report of 30 June 1989, still the source document of the official June Fourth narrative, every characterisation in it still alive in official language. The other is the sentence he left in 2012: that no one should have died. The two legacies contradict each other, and the contradiction is the footnote to his life: he read aloud, in his own voice, the text that defined the protesters as rioters, and twenty-three years later said the bloodshed could have been avoided. The archive does not reconcile those two sentences for him. It pins both to the page, with their dates: 30 June 1989, and 2012.

Sources: Xinhua's 2013 report of his death (as cited by Wikipedia); the New York Times obituary of 5 June 2013 (Chris Buckley); BBC Chinese, 6 June 2013; Wikipedia, "Chen Xitong" (death from cancer on 2 June 2013, aged 82).

16. Our assessment: a signatory's responsibility does not vanish because he "only read the script"

Compressed into archival language, Chen Xitong's life runs like this. A Beijing grassroots cadre who started as a deputy police-substation head climbed, on thirty-nine years of organisational loyalty, to the mayor's office. In the fifty days of the spring of 1989, reporting upward he described the students' protests as organised turmoil; publishing outward, he put his name to the martial-law orders; and addressing the nation, he described a clearance that killed large numbers of civilians as "quelling a counter-revolutionary rebellion". Three years later he entered the Politburo. Six years after that he fell as a corrupt official. Twenty-two years after the report, on what amounted to his sickbed, he said no one should have died.

This site's assessment makes three points, each tied to the facts of this case. First, his responsibility is that of a signatory and an executor, not of the supreme decision-makers. The decision to use force belonged to the highest level around Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and Li Peng, and no archive proves that the order to open fire came from Chen Xitong; to load the highest level's account onto him would be to let the real decision-makers off. But his own late-life portrait of himself as an uninformed puppet equally fails against the archive: the report of 24 April carries his name, the orders of 20 May carry his signature, and the report of 30 June is his voice. A man who signed three times cannot say, twenty-three years later, that he was only passing by. Second, the system's whole handling of him demonstrates exactly how it handles responsibility for a suppression: his 1989 record promoted him into the Politburo, and his 1995 money put him in Qincheng. What was tried was never the suppression; it was standing on the wrong side and reaching for the wrong money. The Chen Xitong who was sentenced had not one word of the dead of the Square in his charge sheet. Third, his "sorry" is worth recording — at its exact size. It was not an apology, not a call for rehabilitation, and it was accompanied by no loosening at all of the "rebellion" characterisation. A man can be at once the reader of a suppression's founding text, the victim of a power struggle, the defendant in a corruption judgment, and the author in old age of one sentence of regret. The archive's duty is to leave him standing in all of those, not to simplify him, for later readers, into any single one.

Chen Xitong is dead; the report is alive. The language fixed by the text of 30 June 1989 — turmoil, rebellion, foreign forces, martial-law troops forced to defend themselves — remains to this day the whole of the official interpretive frame for June Fourth, repeated verbatim in textbooks, memorial halls and diplomatic settings. To file Chen Xitong is to record how that language was read aloud by one man, and how, with that man's fall and death, the system quietly disowned the reader while never withdrawing a word he read. That is why this site places him in the People archive.

Note on sources: this section is this site's assessment, based on the archival facts cited in the body of this file — see Section 3 (the report of 24 April), Section 5 (the signing of the martial-law orders), Section 8 (the report of 30 June), Section 11 (the offences in the 1998 judgment) and Section 13 (the boundaries of the 2012 account).

Contact: endccpworld@proton.me