I was there before the Tiananmen incident.
Many changes, since then.
Good, then perhaps you can give some perspective. When I saw the Tianamen thing building up, it looked to me like Liberal Western @$$holes, and especially Western Journalists were deliberately trying to psych up the locals to challenge the authority of the Chinese Government by making demands.
At that time, it looked to me like China was slowly adopting more freedoms and slowly loosening the restrictions it had on people. It also looked to me like the best thing to do was to be civil and not get pushy. Getting pushy was exactly the wrong thing to do, so naturally liberal western "journalists" were agitating for people to demand more freedoms!
In other words, @$$hole Westerners were inciting a backlash from the Government, and doing so because they were childishly impatient for reform.
They did not take into account the issue of "face", and they acted as though they were in a Liberal Western Democracy instead of a nation that had not so very long ago been very brutal to it's own people.
This is what I saw from watching the news and reading various articles on the subject. From your perspective, how far off am I?