Comment by decimalenough
13 hours ago
Actually, there is plenty of telling, and the largest (only?) massacre outside Beijing was in Chengdu, with 8 to 400 people killed depending on who you believe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_protests_of_1989
There was plenty of rounding up student leaders and executions afterwards, but I don't think even the wildest anti-communists would claim a death toll in the thousands for this.
"Actually, there is plenty of telling"
To this day, the official version is, nothing happened there and then. If you talk about it online inside china, or using chinese services outside of it, it will automatically be blocked.
So yes, people did get out, but till this day they will have to face persecution or other disadvantages and some want to to visit family again or not have them face consequences.
In other words I don't know about any numbers, but how can you claim to know, when the chinese government did all it could to prevent acurate information?
The demonstrations and crackdowns happened in the largest public squares of China's largest cities, in front of thousands of eyewitnesses, and the dead had friends and families who lived to tell about it. So while we don't have exact numbers, we do have reasonably accurate ballpark estimates. For Tiananmen, the best guess is on the order of a thousand dead, with high end 2x that and the official government figures 200-300.