History

On the offchance that you're actually here in good faith. The pop history belief in the west is that a bunch of unarmed innocent protestors were brutally massacred inside the square, this is false and no deaths of protestors occurred in the square. What actually went down is protestors murdered two unarmed negotiators and burned them alive sparking off things turning nasty, a military column then got ransacked and some protestors armed themselves. What followed were dozens of hours of battles across different streets in which hundreds of PLA and armed protestors died. I could post images of these burned negotiators but I'll leave that to you to look up, they're not hard to find and I don't think it adds value to a historic discussion to post the gore when what matters is the version of events.

I can do this two ways for you, I can show it with western liberal sources or I can show it with socialist sources. I'll give you both.

The Telegraph lays it out pretty reasonably in this article in my opinion, and since it's a right wing tory rag so I assume no liberals are gonna accuse it of it being "commie propaganda" lmao.

But don't just take that as the only example. How about we also look back at old articles written at the time it actually occurred?

CBS NEWS: “We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square]”

BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”

NY TIMES: In June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof – who was in Beijing at that time – wrote, “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered.” In that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.

REUTERS: Graham Earnshaw was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. He didn’t leave the square until the morning of June 4th. He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully; and that nobody died in the square.

A Wikileaks cable from the US Embassy in Beijing (sent in July 1989) also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students … until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.”

If instead of me using western major news sources to support my point you'd somehow still want this from my communist perspective. These three pieces are pretty good:

https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/

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

https://archive.ph/24zzF

As for these tanks themselves. The video is of them leaving the square, and when held up like this I think they demonstrated a degree of restraint you wouldn't see from any western military anywhere in the world.