This shit has seriously gone on too long. People who continue to cling to the “10,000 dead crushed by tanks hosed i to the gutter” bs are cranks. It’s jews control the banks, chemtrails, the earth is flat, the moon isn’t real level of crank shit and unless you’re feeling very indulgent and someone is asking in good faith it can be dismissed as equally serious to that kind of crank shit.
And like, the vast majority of people in China at that time had seen their life spans double and gone from living in old style rural farmhouses to communes and apartment complexes with a then-modern quality of life. It’s no wonder that the majority of protestors were against Deng’s liberalizations, they had lived the success of the Mao-era economy and didn’t want to fuck things up - Chinese people alive now would probably go to bat to defend the Dengist economic system in a similar way if the CPC signaled massive reforms.