See there’s the stuff that happened, there’s the version that tankies want to believe (complete denial), which is actually different from the official CCP stance (“necessary and proportionate police action to ensure stability”, with the implication “enough questions, comrade, nothing more to see”), which is different from western public… myth, I have to say. Back when the stuff went down western journalists didn’t know what was happening, there were confusing reports, there were reports of violence, and then there was the tank man – taken the day after (IIRC, but definitely later and no he didn’t get run over). The collective imagination somehow constructed an image of the Chinese army rolling over students. Which is… metaphorically true, but not literally. And then the CCP is using that western imagination to spin their own tale of how the evil west is slandering them.