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[One of my own recollections (from reading some time back) was that at Tiananmen Square, the local PLA Corps(?) was NOT inclined to attack the protesters and may have even to some degree tried to shield them, but was pushed out of the way by more powerful units brought in from outside to crush the protests. Is that correct?]

Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of events on the ground. Hopefully, someone who was high level enough to know the gist of what was happening will have written memoirs to be released to the world when the Party has been pushed out of power. But unless some political or military leader seized the moment and moved to take on the ancien regime, it’s unlikely that mere discontent would have done much for the students. I have read that some of the commanders of the units that are rumored to have balked at mowing down the students were later demoted.

If Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang had moved decisively to corral support from key military figures, it’s possible Deng and his supporters could have been removed from power. The problem for Hu and Zhao is that they would need to have cultivated those ties long before the Tiananmen Square incident. And it’s possible that Deng picked* them both for their positions precisely because of their lack of relationships with high-ranking military leaders. All successful dictators are very conscious of these relationships and the possibilities for mutiny.

However, in the overall scheme of Chinese history, the massacre at Tiananmen was a blip. Compared to 100m (1/4 of the population at the time) dead in multiple revolts aimed at toppling the Qing dynasty during the 19th century, a few thousand students is small beer.

Note that the material I mentioned in my response, re pre-modern palace intrigues, is not obscure. It’s constantly on television in China. Two of China’s 4 great classics, The Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, are about peasant revolts. Not Disneyfied accounts, but gory narratives involving people who wouldn’t be considered paragons of virtue in the modern era. The foreword to one English translation has the following (translated) epigram: “The young should not read Water Margin, and the old should not read Three Kingdoms.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms#Cultural_impact

You won’t have time for this, but a Chinese TV series (about a fictional kingdom) recommended by a Freeper captures the flavor of Chinese intrigues:

https://www.viki.com/videos/1152611v-nirvana-in-fire-english-dubbed-version-episode-1?locale=en

I found it entertaining despite being very confused during the first few episodes.

* Oddly-enough, Jiang Zemin promoted Xi Jinping in the late 90’s, because he thought Xi lacked ambition. As soon as Xi became head honcho though, he started purging all of Jiang’s other proteges. So much for Jiang’s judgment. The fact is that the one skill all Chinese schemers must master is the appearance of obsequiousness and lack of ambition.