Reason Covers Gate of Heavenly Peace 'Affair' (Tiananmen Square), A Few Years Later

First, the Marxist edited version in Wikipedia of what 1989 Tienanmen Square 'affair'* was:

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese, were popular demonstrations crushed by China's army on 4 June 1989, when China's leaders ordered the army to force the protesters out of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On their way to the Square, soldiers killed protesters in unknown numbers, and the crackdown became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June 4 Massacre. However, secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing obtained by WikiLeaks, "partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square. Instead, the cables show that Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the centre of Beijing, as they fought their way towards the square from the west of the city." In the aftermath of the seven-week protests, the Chinese government strengthened its police and internal security forces, and put leadership unity and political consensus ahead of modernization. Economic and political reforms were delayed or halted.

So, according to them, the location of the massacre was slightly different than the location named for the massacre.  "Fought their way" is interesting wording for an armored column vs. unarmed students too.

BBC Coverage at the time, which differs dramatically from the Wikipedia entry:

 An AP report, 20 years later:

This video purports to have additional footage, shows several men ushering the "Tank Man" away:

Liberty Magazine covered it in September, 1989:

Architects of tyranny - Recent events in China and the USSR reveal some odd phenomena concerning certain habits of repressive Communist nations. Take mass architecture, for example. Communist governments construct huge squares in their capital cities (Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Red Square in Moscow)-vast empty spaces adjoining government buildings that house the institutions of supreme state authority. Nearby, dead Communist leaders lay stuffed and mounted under glass, the culmination of a mad taxidermist's vision.

Now the rationale for these vast squares is obvious: they dwarf the human and individual sensibilities of those hapless citizens patiently waiting in line to gaze upon the waxen Great Leader. The puny insignificance of the individual is contrasted to the mighty vastness of the State, which is symbolized by the vast stretch of vacant real estate. Only a thoroughly statist society would waste so much valuable urban land in emptiness instead of filling it with office towers, shops, parks, or streets. These squares have a political purpose: they are ideally suited for great parades, placard waving demonstrations and marches, with leaders gamely waving to the adoring masses below.

That virtue is also a flaw: the masses are liable to assemble in the squares to demonstrate against the State, especially if the masses have taken the democratic rhetoric of their leaders seriously. As events in Tiananmen Square proved, 100,000 or 200,000 people are hard to control when they are massed together in some kind of anti-Marxist Woodstock celebration. One cannot imagine this happening in Washington, London, or
Paris-much less Tokyo-since open spaces in those cities are used as green parks or malls, which don't have the political significance of the Communist pavement prairies, stretching out below the freeze-dried corpses of dead dictators.

So in late May, occupation of Tiananmen Square was the liberation of China, both symbolically and literally. When the "masses" showed up to march without being ordered or shown how and where, government authority simply disappeared. The revolution in the streets played out before the world because 200,000 people are hard to ignore. They gained that certain kind of dangerous courage found in all large crowds, the courage and craziness borne out of anonymity and mass numbers.

The leaders of China were not prepared for this. Along with the Soviet Union, but unlike virtually every other country on earth, the Chinese State had never bothered to acquire nonlethal methods of crowd control. Modern technology has provided the State with dozens of ways of controlling crowds without killing them: tear gas, rubber and plastic bullets, pepper and CS gas, stun guns, bamboo poles, plastic shields, water cannons ... the list of non-lethal means of crowd control is as long as it is depressing.

So it came to pass that the Chinese relied on the only means at their disposal to disperse the crowd at Tiananmen: send in armed troops and tanks to kill those who wouldn't disperse fast enough. The world got a chance to see the murderous Chinese State in action, violating the ostensible spirit of its own revolution in an attempt to suppress the new Chinese revolution. Huge as Tiananmen Square is, it is not large enough to be the sort of battlefield on which tanks are effective. The resulting spectacle of huge tanks attempting to maneuver against unarmed demonstrators between huge buildings would have been amusing had it not been so tragic.

Why didn't the Chinese and Soviets have non-lethal means of dealing with crowds? Both have shown little reluctance in the past to commit mass murder, but in this age of global television, surely they are concerned about both internal and external public opinion. Apparently inured by their years of unchallenged rule, they never anticipated that their subjects would take their rhetoric about democracy and freedom seriously.
Evidently, the lack of non-lethal crowd control is another example of the failure of socialist planning. - MH

According to the Reason.Com archives, the Free Markets/Free Minds crowd got around to this 'little' story in 1991: The Calm After the Storm Life after Tiananmen. George Tseo from the July 1991 issue -

“I think the government was ... a bit harsh,” said Jin, a plump computer consultant with a wispy mustache. The window of our “hard-sleep” train compartment was raised. I pursed my lips in tacit response to Jin’s remark and looked past him and the fluttering white lace curtain. Outside, verdant summits towered above a flat, watery expanse of rice paddies. “Moreover,” continued Jin, pausing to take a slow drag on his cigarette, “the students were reasonable in their demands.”

“The students were arrogant,” interjected Professor Hu, a lanky, bird-like man. “The regime showed restraint, and in return, the students gloated over a ‘victory’! The government had to resort to force. How else could they reestablish credibility?”

Jin lifted his brows as though to say “perhaps,” then blew smoke out of his mouth.

. . . the rest at Reason.

*The Communists like to call things like the Haymarket terrorist attack "affairs", thus the wording and sarcastic quotes.