It was not fabricated, it was exaggerated. Clashes occurred around Beijing and bloodshed was real. Most of them were Maoists clashing with pro market reform government.
Nobody is denying bloodshed. There absolutely were violent protests outside the square. The claim in question is that the military gunned down thousands of peaceful protesters in the square, which so far as I know is a claim that's exclusively made by people who were not there.
Funniest thing is that "tank man" photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don't realize there is video of it, that the guy didn't get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.
The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the "protestors" or the police who were killed when the "protestors" threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn't actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.
My personal opinion on the matter isn't that much different from yours (the biggest reason being that the media blitz about the massacre seemed preplanned... It just didn't go according to plan). The problem is that I can't prove anything, so it's all conjecture. So I typically leave that out. It's already a sensitive enough subject.
On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn't happen in the square itself.
So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
most of them by the time the actual violent clashes happened certainly werent maoists. Yeah there was a significant % of the protestors that were coming from the left of the CPC but you have to remember that the unrest span month(s) and many cities. In Tainanmen by that point in the movement and leading to that the make up of those that stayed and engaged in lynchings and clashes with the PLA and police was solidly "pro-democracy/free-s[peech/liberalism" youth. Also western intelligence focus and assets had already zeroed in in Beijing and those elements after smelling blood from the more organic initial country wide unrest.