turns out you can just make shit up about China, and most westerners are incurious chauvinists so you can usually get away with it

It’s taught as part of the mandatory “outline of modern Chinese history” at university.

三、中国特色社会主义事业的继续推进 （一）1989年政治风波的发生与平息 风波形成的原因：腐败现象的出现、人民群众的不满、党在工作中的失误、敌对势力的破坏 风波平息后的总结：稳定非常重要；“一个中心、两个基本点”不能动摇；要时刻注意纠正失误；不能屈服于外来压力

Disinformation and anti-party agitation, yes. Of course, what they view as “disinformation” may be different from how you view it, but you are correct that the idea of any mention of it being banned is made up and as the other commenter said it is taught about in schools there. It is certainly a sore spot for the Party in some respects, but there’s no use in trying to construct a false reality where nothing happened when it has lots of documentation including a large number of instances of it being publicly addressed on Chinese state media and in international discourse.

The stance of the Party, which I think is broadly correct, is that most of the protestors were innocent and not involved in anything nefarious, but some treasonous individuals took advantage of the protests to try to instigate a counterrevolution (this is documented fact), proactively engaged in violence against the PLA (documented fact), and in the process of trying to crush this opposition force there were a number of innocent people (both manipulated protestors and total bystanders) who were caught in the crossfire, many of them tragically dying. That said, the vast majority of the protestors dispersed with the initial dispersal order and the bulk of the remainder were dispersed without a shot being fired*, and the PLA were only shooting after that point (to the best of my knowledge, this is also a documented fact).

*some people were hit with batons to make them move, and I assume in some cases people were pushed or manhandled, but that’s the extent of the violence at that stage as far as I know.

So there’s a combination of things that are literally just true and some parts that are matters of one’s interpretation of the evidence.

Edit: It is also simply true that no one died in the Square itself, and while this seems like absurd hair-splitting (and sometimes it is), the importance of this claim is that it discredits certain myths of people who claimed to see people killed and mutilated in the Square itself. People were killed, as already mentioned, it just happened elsewhere.

Iirc people in China refer to it as The June 4th Incident and get taught about it in schools, someone who knows more about the topic could give you more in depth info though

I’ve asked my Chinese teacher about it, she’s way up in liaoning province. She pulled up the chinese wikipedia page and told me she’d learned about it in school lmao

also a minor nitpick, but it’s very silly to claim they ban mention of “tiananmen square” because tiananmen square is just a massive fucking public square that they hold events in, tons of chinese people visit it constantly. the actual claim is that they ban mention of the “tiananmen square massacre” which also is bullshit but it’s just funny to me that this somehow morphed into the evil chinese government hiding a literal square

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