Also notable that all western sources reporting from the square at that time reported at most a few hundred casualties and none of them were students in the square. The students all left peacefully at the request of the PLA. By that point the protests had been hijacked by literal CIA agents trying to incite a massacre, a far cry from the original Student demands of a more permissive social atmosphere (things like couples being able to show affection in public without judgement, not even necessarily government.) There was also a large communist faction who wanted the government to move it’s policies back towards communism instead of liberal reforms. And again, they weren’t asking for anything drastic, nor were they trying to overthrow the government. The whole mood in the square, for the most part, was pretty chill. The Students were singing songs together with the PLA troops, getting them food, talking with them. The PLA troops were totally unarmed. No batons, no riot gear. Just hanging out in their uniforms.

Afaik what finally drove the PLA to clear out the square was that anti-communist paramilitaries were attacking PLA troops with fire bombs and stolen guns. A lot of PLA soldiers burned to death when their trucks or APCs got firebombed, and it lead to street fighting while the PLA tried to get soldiers with weapons in to the area to fight the insurgents. But even then, it was only a few hundred, maybe a thousand insurgents. All the fighting happened blocks away from the square.

And while my details may be incorrect there isn’t really any disagreement about what happened outside of the absurdly sensationalized propaganda story. All the western journalists who were present at the time reported - No one was killed in the square, fighting outside the square, a few hundred dead at most. The western contemporary accounts line up almost exactly with the official Chinese accounts. And afaik there was no crack down or anything afterwards. The protestors, for the most part, conducted themselves well and had a legitimate grievance, and left peacefully when asked, so the government didn’t really feel threatened by the movement and felt it was better to let things settle down than escalate.

Edit: Believe it or not, the last time I checked the Wiki on Tiennemen square it pretty straightforwardly reported the real, non-sensationalized version, complete with sources. idk how good the details are, but the version on wikipedia right now (or at least last year, when I read it) is not the 10,000 run over by tanks BS.