Last week while looking for a book on my bookshelf I happened upon a slim, blue-covered pamphlet wedged between two larger books. The moment I pulled it out I recognized it as something I hadn’t seen in many, many years—the Report on Putting Down Anti-Government Riot (关于反政府暴乱的报告). It was the official government account, in English, of the government response to the student protests in Tiananmen Square during the late spring and early summer of 1989.

The book is a first printing published by New Star Publishers (新星出版社), of a “Report on Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counter-Revolutionar Rebellion”signed by Chen Xitong, State Councillor and Mayor of Beijing on June 30, 1989. Chen has since made public comments that deaths that day may have been avoidable.

This morning I asked our divisional administrative assistant to scan it as a PDF so that I could post it here for anyone that might be interested. In a sense this is a primary historical document that might be useful for history students to use in assignments related to the period—especially folks whose Chinese level is not yet up to reading primary sources in the original Chinese.

Here is the link: Chen Xitong_Report on Putting Down Anti-Government Riot_1989