I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b).
The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.
It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery.
From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity.
The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.
Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
The labor camp comment was in response to someone calling quote 'china' a quote 'psychopath' while being very obviously ignorant about what it's like inside the country. So I'm gonna have to disagree if you're saying they were straw-manning a thoughtful and balanced comment.
There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.
The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.