[1] He also served as the head of international goodwill delegations to a variety of places including North Korea, U.S.A, Moscow, France, Ankara, Warsaw, East Berlin.
[7] Chen Xitong, on April 23, called a meeting with presidents of various Beijing universities, chastised them for their passivity and asked them to gather more information on the protests.
[12] On April 26, the People’s Daily published an editorial, based largely on Deng Xiaoping's reaction to Li Peng's report that painted the protest as turmoil.
Zhao Ziyang appointed Chen Xitong and Li Ximing as part of a delegation to meet with the students at Tiananmen.
[23][24] According to the May 18th entry of Li Peng's unpublished diary, The Critical Moment, in a Committee meeting to decide the next course of action, Chen Xitong was put in charge of carrying out a martial law order with assistance from a military general.
[26][27] This again exacerbated the crisis as more people showed up to support the students in reaction to the announcement and prevented soldiers from carrying out the order to clear the square.
[29] Chen Xitong and Li Ximing then went to Deng Xiaoping's home on June 2 and gave him a report that portrayed the protest as part of an international plot to derail the progress of China.
[30] On the night of June 3, the People's Liberation Army would finally carry out the order to clear the square, which resulted in deadly casualties.
James Miles, BBC's Beijing correspondent at the time, believes his physical absence to back up the statement was a sign of the Party's political uncertainty following the crackdown.
[32][33] On June 30 at the 7th National People's Congress’ (NPC) 8th session, Chen Xitong delivered the CCP’s official narrative of the events titled Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-revolutionary Rebellion.
Chen Xitong accused anti-socialist actors from Hong Kong of facilitating the student protest by providing weapons and money.
[44] Scholar of East Asian studies, Ezra Vogel, presents the argument that Chen Xitong exaggerated the dangers posed by the initial protests in his April 24 report to the PSC.
[52][53] This compared to Jiang Zemin who was able to incentivize workers in Shanghai to remove roadblocks and students, a feat that gained the respect of party elders.
[25] On his administration of the martial law order, Chen was puzzled by the idea that he was in charge of the crackdown of June 3–4 and claims he had no knowledge of this until Li Peng's diary surfaced in 2010.
[25] Wu Guoguang's foreword states that due to the chaotic nature of those few days, it is plausible that Chen was not informed about his role in the crackdown in advance.
[57] There are also reports that Chen Xitong stated that he is a staunch communist, and opposing unrest was his basic attitude during that day and he has not changed this view.
that the money that Chen embezzled was used to build vacational recreation centers, which catered to most top-tier politicians in Beijing at the time.
[60][66] The novel The Wrath of Heaven — the Anti-Corruption Bureau in Action (天怒—反貪局在行動; pinyin: Tiān nù—Fǎntānjú zài Xíngdòng), published in 1996, is a fictionalized account of the Chen Xitong case written from the point of a view of an investigator.