It was not the demonstrators who "chose to instigate violence" in 1989 but the army who, from around 10pm the previous night, had been opening fire on anyone who got in their way. By the time the first armored personnel carrier reached Tiananmen Square, the massacre had been going on for five or six hours - small wonder that someone threw a Molotov cocktail at it. At the time, CNN and the BBC carried graphic footage of the shootings, and of the indescribable scenes in Beijing's hospitals as the dead and wounded were brought in. There is no doubt that documentary evidence of the massacre exists - even the Chinese government had to produce some pictures of dead civilians in their justification of June 4. And I have seen pictures of the statue in the square riddled with bullet holes. What is true is that very few people (not none) were killed in the square itself. By the time the army entered the square the fighting was almost over, and the students negotiated a retreat - though some students who were in the square that night have insisted that the army opened fire as they left, and that a number of students were killed. The vast majority of the army's victims were killed as the army fought its way into central Beijing, particularly in the western suburbs of the city. On the morning of June 4th the Chinese Red Cross claimed that 2,600 people had been killed, based on a survey of the hospitals. The extensive literature that has since appeared on the massacre contains conflicting details of the events of the night, but there is general agreement that the casualties ran well into four figures, and that the army came in prepared to kill as many people as necessary. Although there was heroic resistance, the truth is that unarmed people were shot down not in their hundreds, but in several thousands.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM1.TAN.TANK.CRUSHES.HTM
