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Chen responded that an investigation by a Beijing vice mayor at the time, He Luli, found that around 200 people were killed, but Chen then added that he thought the matter ought to be re-investigated. "The facts of that time need to be seriously investigated, deserve to be researched," Chen is quoted as saying in an advance copy of the book obtained from the publisher by The Associated Press. Yao said that Chen maintains his responsibilities as mayor during the protests were largely limited to logistics and that power over the capital's police and other security forces as well as the judiciary lay with Beijing's then-Communist Party boss Li Ximing. Li, who died in 2008, and Chen were both credited with advocating the assault on the night of June 3-4, 1989 in a compilation of purported internal documents on the crackdown that was earlier published overseas. According to "The Tiananmen Papers," published in 2001, the two men endorsed a document labeling the protests as an "anti-Party and anti-socialist political struggle," all but eliminating the possibility of dialogue. Chen also denies writing the only official assessment on the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, a document that he read out to the Standing Committee of China's legislature, the National People's Congress, in 1989. "The (Communist Party) Central Committee was responsible for drafting it," he is quoted as saying in the book. "The Central Committee provided the text for me to read. I couldn't not read it."
[Associated
Press;
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