As ridiculous and provocative as it may sound to the average person whose perception of the events of Tiananmen square are based on extremist right-wing propaganda from the white house, Tiananmen square rioting was a product of Operation Yellowbird with many student leaders collaborating with the CIA out of Hong Kong. The US also used their spy networks and criminal triads to smuggle the criminals behind the riots out of China and take them to the US when the communist party restored order afterwards. Additionally, many facts and events of Tiananmen square are completely fabricated or heavily distorted by the US regime. The famous “Tank man” was never harmed by the military and even mounted the tank, opened the hatch, and harassed the driver. Many members of the PLA were killed or injured by rioters, with some even hanging.
Of course, the US has no sense of irony for their ham-fisted and propagandistic depictions of Tiananmen riots. After one of their officers executed an unarmed civilian by the name of George Floyd, they used rubber bullets and lethal force to suppress protests against police violence, and their police force is still despised by the citizenry to this day not only for their crimes during that time, but the long history that the police force has of harassing and lynching their own citizens, especially those of ethnic minorities that are persecuted by the police.
Knowing everything that we know now, I would say that the communist party of China not only handled the situation as carefully and with the least amount of harm to the people as possible, but I would be willing to personally drive a tank into Tiananmen if the protests were happening today. I think any person who truly chooses the proletariat over class enemies should do the same. Western liberals perceive support for the Chinese police as comparable to the blue lives matter movements of the west or the unhinged worship of police in a liberal society. This comparison completely ignores class struggle and is therefore anti-marxist. It also rejects differences in political and authority systems around the world making it first-worldist and undialectical. A person who wants to build a socialist state rejecting the authority of the socialist state to police itself and defend itself is extremely bizarre, and seems to be based on past experience being persecuted by the bourgeois state in various ways. Of course a police force is not perfect and even in a socialist society there can be reactionaries infiltrating or operating within any organization, but the difference is accountability and the protection of the civil rights of the citizens which cannot exist in a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
If you want to go and ask me where I think wiser action might have saved lives, it’s ironically NOT because I think the students could have been talked out of it. They couldn’t because of firebrands and fifth-columnists like Chai Ling.
It was because the Zhao Ziyang government thought that the students were sincere; that they could have been talked out of it, and Zhao Ziyang, himself, came down to the students and cried in a desperate attempt to get them to peacefully end their demonstrations, to no avail.
If Zhongnanhai had accurately known that the democracy movement was a CIA-front, that the US embassy was acting to arm the proletarian protests against the PLA, Zhongnanhai could have acted more swiftly to forcefully nix the protests, such that lethal force would not have been required, or required in such large degrees.
That is what I mean when I say “Tiananmen is a truly unfortunate incident that has been exaggerated and distorted by the Western press, and the loss of life on both sides is truly regrettable.” It’s a dogwhistle, onlookers can be dragged into the “myths of Tiananmen” research, including by Western journalists who were on the scene, as far as they are willing, but I do not support a hardcore approach of straight denialism.
The best part, imo, is that the unreliable liberals were shown for who they were, and purged, but tbh, this would likely not have been possible if the protests had not gotten out of control.
In retrospect, I’d say Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a positive for China for the very reason that political liberalization was kicked brutally off the table. We see clearly the results of the alternative in modern Russia, with an out-of-control oligarch class.