First of all: I'm Chinese. If there were any American analogue to Tienanmen square: it would be the Occupy movement rather than Kony. It's a travesty to just call them a bunch of rebellious college students. And the demands of the college student resonated with far beyond the college students themselves, but with the working class and the people of Beijing as well: which is largely why the government decided they had to crush it in the first place.

To give some context, China in 1989 have being moving well away from Maoism for the previous 10 years under Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's open and reform policies (gaige kaifang). While overall it brought enormous net benefits to China, it also had significant negative consequences, many of which is easily seen in China today. Growing inequality between the rich and poor, huge increase in corruption and graft, the loss of careers for many with the dismantling of state owned enterprises/work units, inflation as price controls on food and other basic necessities were removed. It was a time when from certain points of view: the life of the average Chinese was either getting worse or at least remain very uncertain when the country as a whole was getting much richer. It wasn't a protest against the Communist past as in Europe, but rather against the present, against the inequality and injustices of a Capitalizing society which the students had being taught was wrong by their schools all their lives.

The protesters themselves were an amalgamation of ideologies (as with any protest). There were radicals who wanted to bring down the Chinese Communist party (CCP) like they were being brought down in Eastern Europe. But the protests were not anti-Communist like 1989 Eastern European ones for the simple reason that China was rapidly moving away from Communism already. For the vast majority they were content with the CCP staying power. Nor was it a repudiation of Mao's legacy: when some students attempted to vandalize Mao's huge portrait at the square the protesters actually handed them over to the police. What they did want was more democratic oversight over the government, better distribution of the economical bounties from China's reform policies, social and economic justice in general. In other words, the protests, at least to me, doesn't seem to much ideological as much as it was protesting against perceived ongoing grievances with the average person's life that the government was either causing or not doing enough about.

And this is where the resonance with the people of Beijing comes in. The people of Beijing in general supported the students because they were expressing the grievances which at the end of the day impacted the working class far more than the students: who were generally from more affluent families (also, this is why far more workers than students were executed by the government afterwards: since the students had important/well-off relatives to protect them).

None demonstrates this better than when the first wave of PLA soldiers entered Beijing having their vehicles being blocked off by Beijing residents and: ironically enough right out of the most idealized version of a Socialist revolution, reluctantly fraternizing with them. Many of those particular army troops were either Beijiner themselves or from areas around Beijing and therefore had deep connections with residents. If you watch footage of those troops you could see how horrible they must have felt as the people they lived around all their lives asking them "you are the people's army, how could you suppress those students you are suppose to be protecting?".

The end result of this was that the government decided those troops probably couldn't be relied upon to shoot down the students and pulled them out. They made sure subsequent army troops: the ones who actually did the suppression, were not troops who were from near Beijing, and whom did not speak the same dialect of Chinese as Beijiners did. That way they could simply tell them "those students are counter-revolutionaries" and when those troops have lots and lots of people in the streets yelling at them in a language you don't understand....well, if you were put in that spot you might be induced to believe it. But despite that: many many PLA officers were executed afterwards for (rightfully) refusing orders to fire on the students.

I think there is no way that a government sending in troops to suppress a peaceful protest can possibly be justified. But I don't really care to debate whether the students had the right to fight back against tanks being sent to suppress them. But the students themselves: arrogant and idealistic as they were, were hardly blameless either. Since the government was quite eager to negotiate with them at several points and they themselves sort of screwed it up.

As far as I'm concerned, the tank man certainly received quite a bit of western spin. But he remains a hero, because he represented a popular movement standing up against the brutal machinery of the state. To me, he represented a moment, a moment when the Chinese people had wished for and conceived of a better society than the one they had and took to the streets to try to achieve it together. Something which is sorely lacking in China today, which I feel people frankly have decided things are corrupt, nothing can be changed, so they decide to just take as much as they could out of themselves, no matter what injustices they are perpetuating.