The cops in America literally use military gear on protestors. Unmarked vans literally grabbed people off of the street in 2020.

Let's say nobody died, it wasn't a massacre.

No one is saying no one died (though no one died in the square, which is helpful for spotting when someone is lying)

Those are all flattened bicycles and scared people on the ground.

Yeah, that's what's in the one picture

This is still the state sending the military to put down a protest.

The protest had been going on for weeks right on the equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the WH and, critically, a couple of unarmed PLA soldiers were burned alive by incendiaries and had their corpses strung up in the open. Some people also stole some guns from inside an APC that got burned (though I think that fire was an accident).

Most protestors left well before the tanks got there because they listened when the state said "disperse by this deadline". One of the big holdovers besides militants was from people following the leadership that was deliberately trying to instigate bloodshed so they'd have propaganda to exploit (and they said as much in private beforehand!).

Those are tanks from the national government

The entity centered a stone's throw from the Square, yes

directed at unarmed young adults from the same country right?

Afaik the tanks never fired and they and the other military elements weren't there to attack protestors. In the Square itself, the highest level of violence was hitting some people with batons to get them to leave. As far as I know, there were no major physical injuries from this. The lethal violence was between soldiers and militants elsewhere.

What would've happened had people not dispersed?

Soldiers would have kept getting killed and there probably would have been an attack on the federal buildings right nearby.

Were the tanks and guns just to scare people?

The tanks? Yeah, they wouldn't even be very useful against the militants unless the CPC wanted to knock down some buildings (which they did not). The guns were mostly for intimidation but also to kill militants who fought the force sent to disperse people.

What would you think of Biden or Trump calling our military to put down protests like what happened in summer of 2020 in the U.S.?

Considering the level of militarized violence used against protestors who killed zero people and the fact that one dude who shot someone in self-defense was literally black-bagged on the President's direct orders, to say nothing of the many organizers who were killed deliberately outside of the protests and were written off as "suicides" with no note or history of depression . . . I don't see what you're trying to say.

They were looking at a protest with very right-wing, reactionary components and a significant US backing, and before the bulk of the casualties occurred the protestors burned alive a PLA soldier. You can't have the tanks rolling in on every protest, but you certainly don't just lay down and accept a right wing coup attempt.

Let's say nobody died

Some students and soldiers did die though, and the government has not denied this. Of note here, if we are concerned about the scale of the bloodshed, is that many students vacated from the situation peacefully. Many who were remained in the square were certainly influenced by the most hardline leaders such as Chai Ling (working closely with the CIA), who all but admitted she wanted the students to die for her goal. She said, in her own words:

The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?

(Are you going to stay in the Square yourself?)

No, I won’t. Because my situation is different. My name is on the government’s hit list. I’m not going to let myself be destroyed by this government. I want to live.

So, the tragedy of the June 4th incident was not a cold blooded massacre of dissidents, where the military rolled in the tanks and murdered thousands of people. There was chaotic skirmishing between soldiers and a congregation of students and workers with largely nonuniform political demands, with the more animated among them seeking to overthrow the government. Several hundred people died as a result.

The distortion of truth around this event is genuinely alarming. It's clearly a story that defines of a lot of westerners' views on the entire country of China, when even their understanding of this single event is so far from reality it is practically pure fabrication. Below I'm quoting this essay on the topic: https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen

As with the leaders of the Tiananmen Student movement, we could go on. Any serious effort at contextualizing the tragedy of Tiananmen would inevitably render the simple truth that what has made Tiananmen an exceptional event in modern history had nothing to do with its brutality, or that it happened in a period that we have retroactively imagined as peaceful, or the virtue of the fallen students. What keeps it a yearly staple of our media diets is simply its sheer utility in destroying international proletarian solidarity with China, and so safeguarding the stability of bourgeois rule in the West.

Could bloodshed have been avoided? Had there not been that ever-helpful US meddling... we can discuss that as well as other hypotheticals ad infinitum. What happened in reality was a tragedy and cannot be changed. It also cannot, with any amount of intellectual honesty, be used to completely discredit and dismiss the Chinese socialist project wholesale the way it has always been used.

the thing to know about Tiannanmen is that there was several things going on at once

1: a riot where people were lynching PLA soldiers and setting them on fire outside of the square

CW: unspeakably horrific photos of, and I cannot stress this enough, unarmed, PLA soldiers getting lynched

2: a protest that had a broad coalition of issues inside the square

unarmed PLA soldiers with the protesters

3: #1 is where most of the violence happened, #2 is where most of the media attention was focused

4: one of the leaders of #2 specifically wanted to provoke a massacre in order to make the govt. look as bad as possible and was disappointed when that didn't happen

5: western media was not only allowed into the country to film the protests, that is how we have the tank man "photo" that people know about more than the video. Jeff Widener, an american photographer and pulitzer prize winner, took the "photo" of tank man "about to be run over" that everyone in the west thinks is "censored" in china. Why was jeff widener and others allowed in to film this "massacre" that the chinese covered up

What would you say on the Kent State Massacre where the Ohio National Guard opened fire on college protesters? What of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia where cops dropped bombs on a residential street and allowed people to burn alive, the remains of some of the children being kept in a university storage until only recently. How many people woke up one night to the sound of their door being caved in only to be immediately shot for trying to defend themselves from a no knock warrant. The terrible forces of the US government terrorize us far more on a regular basis.

Just like GaveUp said, the use of the military made sense, the US has a long bloody history of interference in other nations' affairs. Look at all the coups the US had started in South America alone, how many despots and dictators were installed to allow US multinationals to pillage these nations as they murdered thousands. Were other socialist nations supposed to just lay down and not fight to keep the hard won victories?

The protests were heavily astroturfed and backed by the US government looking to coup China and regime change the nation

I'd say showing the military was an appropriate response given the scale, influence, and success the US government has when it comes to couping and sabotaging foreign states

https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/

Those are tanks from the national government designed for defense against state level enemies, directed at unarmed young adults from the same country right?

The protestors had intercepted several buses full of PLA soldiers and beaten them to death, and then had taken their weapons and body armor. The eventual tank man incident was after days of escalated skirmishes and fighting, which involved molotov cocktails and firefights. There was at least one instance of protestors hijacking a military APC and taking it for a joyride.

The tanks showed up three days after initial attempts to disperse the crowd had failed. The guy in front of the tank happened on June 5th. The previous day of June 4th, protestors had dragged a soldier out of an APC and burned him alive.

I'm not gonna comment much on the merits of what the protestors wanted, or the escalation or force, or any of that. It's not my place and I'm not from China. I'm not going to tell them how to organize their society. All I know really is the protestors were there for various reasons, probably a lot of them for legitimate grievances.

However I am American though and I can tell you that if a protest movement here in the States had set fire to an American soldier, everyone there would get shot. And that's not what happened in China. These are smaller scale examples, but I only know to compare it to something like the Kent State massacre or the 1967 Detroit riots. By a comparison to those, the Chinese soldiers were extremely restrained, using standard riot-control methods. The only instances I know where PLA soldiers opened fire upon civilians were when the civilians were armed and shooting at them first. Whereas the American national guard was much more willing to fire fully-automatic rifles into crowds to kill unarmed people indiscriminately.

Tank man happened after much of the fighting and violence that had happened in the previous days (and nights especially) so the tanks were definitely there for pre-emptive defense/a threat to escalation.

Even western reporters like the BBC's John Simpson (very much part of the British establishment class then and now) reported at the time that there was violent clashes less in the square itself, but mostly in the side streets between armed protestors (many of whom have since admitted they were funded or straight up supplied with weapons by the US) and Chinese state police and military - with shooting on both sides plus a lot of beatings and firebombs from the insurrectionist elements.

John Simpson himself has told the story for decades of how he witnessed a smaller group amongst a bigger amount of protestors firebomb a military truck killing the driver. The passengers who jumped out were then set up and beaten to death or almost by the protestors. He apparently intervened, waving a stick/post and his press badge at them to try and drag one of thr badly beaten soldiers out of the mob. His reporting at the time and in recounting that story afterwards makes no secret of the fact that he saw those groups of protestors/insurrectionists as a murderous and bloodthirsty mob, not as peaceful protestors defending themselves. In recent years during the new cold War and red scare against China he's soften his criticism of the protestors and upped his anti-China rhetoric a bit, but has never disputed his original reporting or it's conclusions.

So there absolutely was violence and bloodshed. Innocent people on both sides were likely caught in it. But basically no one at the time, including explicitly pro-West, anti-China reporters, saw a one sided massacre of the state firing on peaceful crowds.

Similarly you can go and look up interviews with the Canadian photographer who took the famous tank man photo. Most of the more recent ones are him getting visibly annoyed at news presenters undermining his account by trying to force this fictional narrative that only came about many years later as anti-China propaganda. And like John Simpson, he's absolutely anti-China in general, but doesn't like that the risks he took for his reporting has been undermined by a sensationalist fiction.

We're definitely not saying nobody died. The only disputes here are details of the event, location, and the cause of the conflict. The original narrative is that a bunch of unarmed students were massacred because "evil communists" inside the square. Whereas the correct narrative is that a series of issues led to protests that were coopted by people who sought to end the state altogether, and the foreign influence involved wanted a massacre to occur (hence the immediate media blitz). Protest leaders are on video directly saying this (but they won't participate). What actually happened was that the protesters were intentionally riled up to the point of doing incredibly extreme things, the first casualty of the event was an unarmed PLA officer who was tied up, stabbed and burned alive, while another was hung. What later transpired was a series of battles between armed protesters and the state in many different streets across several miles.

None of this is to say that the event was not a tragedy. It certainly was. But if you understand it in its correct and truthful light these events are a quite different narrative to that pushed by the west for the purposes of anticommunism.

One of the biggest reasons this narrative is pushed is because this was the turning point, this was the moment that they thought China was going to go the same way as the USSR. But it didn't. It was the time China came closest to an actual defeat by the capitalists. This enrages the liberals that understand this.

around 300 people died, that is not disputed. but those deaths did not happen in the square, and iirc a bit more than half of them were army or police

You have to look at the broader world context. This wasn't just a simple protest. This was a Western backed movement (even wikipedia acknowledges the CIA was actively aiding the movement) to overthrow the Chinese government happening at the exact same time similar movements were ending socialism throughout the entire Eastern bloc. This entire purpose of a socialist state (we can debate about whether the PRC was one at this point, or w/e, but they at least ostensibly were) is to defend socialism against counter-revolutionaries. Is that not what happened here? If anything I think the response was rather lax.

If the leadership of the DDR, USSR, Poland, etc. had taken decisive action like this, then they wouldn't have collapsed. Of course, that would required them to not all be miserable revisionists; which they sadly all were.

Imho this is an entirely valid view to have.

The military being used the crush a protest doesn't sit right with me either, regardless of who's doing it and whether or not people died.

That said, I do not buy the western™ narrative on Tiananmen Square in the slightest.

There were a bunch of soldiers killed and a whole lot of military vehicles destroyed, so to me that contradicts the narrative that the protestors were just hecking harmless smol beans.

What would've happened had people not dispersed? Were the tanks and guns just to scare people?

Probably -- we can't assume they would have started firing into the crowd. There weren't any confrontations like this that tturned violent during the fall of the USSR, for instance, and Cuba has also broken up protests without simply shooting people. Most states do everything they can to avoid getting to that point; AES states are not an exception. Crowd control is its own discipline and intimidation is part of it. We also have the fact that they rolled all that stuff out there and backed off.

What should they have done? Do you just open the doors to any unelected group that shows up on the doorstep of the capitol?

Of course the sending of tanks is a threat of violence, but the threat was enough that most walked away. There were discussions with protest leaders and necessary changes were all considered. The ones which the party determined to be valid were taken and others rejected. It was a largely liberal and student-oriented protest, though, with many feelings which were opposed to working class interests, and those were dismissed. Then, after weeks, one of the busiest areas in the world had to be cleared for the resuming of life there as it was for the people living there. This is already fine, to me, because the debates occurred and the interests/benefits were considered in a democratic way. Also, note, this ignores that many unarmed army were murdered and therefore the threat of force had to be much more direct (not just an soldier who will be defended by more/new ones with guns, but actually just sending the guns so those soldiers could defend against their own lynching)