this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Post a photo of the Tiananmen Square massacre and see what happens.
That the massacres happened in side streets, largely military vs. local non-student supporters, doesn't mean that the students weren't threatened with "move now or there's going to be blood", or that those massacres would not be connected to what went down on the square, even if not directly on it. As such your semantic quibbles are meaningless. After the hardliners in the CCP won out when it comes to how to handle the protest the whole party turned away from Deng's reforms for what about ten years or so, hardliners apparently fearing that if they reformed anything, people would want even more reforms, as evidenced by the Tiananmen protests.
The whole thing is just perfect proof how stuffy, crusty, and calcified the CCP is in general, and how out of touch with what people actually want.
Given the reports from Western journalists, this is closest to the truth (though we don't know if there was an actual threat or if the gunshots around the area were enough threat on its own). China basically treats 6/4 like the Israeli hospital bombing "it wasn't us, but if it was then we didn't actually cause it, and if we did then people didn't actually die, and if people died it was only a few people."
This is, of course, in the context of growing corruption in government and increasing influence of American intelligence in the Chinese mainland. We know that some of the pro-democracy activists were funded and supported by American interests and that, at least according to American propaganda, that American psyops divisions were operating in China to orchestrate and escalate the event. 6/4 is a failed coup. American interests wanted to see further Chinese liberalization and tried to apply the same playbook that they had applied before in South America and the Middle East (and later in Ukraine, Pakistan) to China.
Further economic liberalization was not in the best interests of the people. While Deng's economic reforms had helped to grow China's economy in the globalizing economy at the end of the Cold War, it also created a new bourgeois and petite-bourgeois class that China is still grappling with today.