so far from this thread I'm seeing something between "no civilians were injured" and "it was a violent mob that needed to be stopped by any means."
Can you point out where you're seeing those things specifically?
I'm trying to get a baseline for what you think happened
We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say "Chinese authorities massacred people."
For the most part, this hasn't even been about making moral judgment calls, which sounds like what you're fishing for and why you seem to think it's difficult to parse our position. This is partially implied by your phrasing "suppressed a riot? dispersed a violent protest?" etc. This has been about us just saying: Look, here is how things actually went down and by no stretch can that be called "a massacre" unless you want to also say that protesters in the streets were "massacring" soldiers and cops. Also, all of this happened relatively far away from the square, which is relevant because that is where many students were protesting and where the imagery for the "Tiananmen Massacre" false narrative comes from. Unless I have missed a comment or two somewhere, no one here is saying that "no civilians were injured." In fact I think your phrasing of it that way is dishonestly projecting a position onto us that none of us hold. People were killed on both sides of the conflict, and indeed it was PLA soldiers who were killed first which unsurprisingly, understandably culminated in a violent response. The narrative that the CPC ordered the PLA to massacre unarmed student protesters is just a load of propagandistic horse shit.
Here is a bit from one of the links already provided:
In essence, it [the false western narrative] says that Chinese authorities massacred unarmed student protesters demanding democracy, slaughtering thousands and even tens of thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Extensive subsequent research and many eyewitness accounts have shown conclusively that none of this is true. The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.
There's your "baseline" for what we "think" happened.