Those are tanks from the national government designed for defense against state level enemies, directed at unarmed young adults from the same country right?

The protestors had intercepted several buses full of PLA soldiers and beaten them to death, and then had taken their weapons and body armor. The eventual tank man incident was after days of escalated skirmishes and fighting, which involved molotov cocktails and firefights. There was at least one instance of protestors hijacking a military APC and taking it for a joyride.

The tanks showed up three days after initial attempts to disperse the crowd had failed. The guy in front of the tank happened on June 5th. The previous day of June 4th, protestors had dragged a soldier out of an APC and burned him alive.

I’m not gonna comment much on the merits of what the protestors wanted, or the escalation or force, or any of that. It’s not my place and I’m not from China. I’m not going to tell them how to organize their society. All I know really is the protestors were there for various reasons, probably a lot of them for legitimate grievances.

However I am American though and I can tell you that if a protest movement here in the States had set fire to an American soldier, everyone there would get shot. And that’s not what happened in China. These are smaller scale examples, but I only know to compare it to something like the Kent State massacre or the 1967 Detroit riots. By a comparison to those, the Chinese soldiers were extremely restrained, using standard riot-control methods. The only instances I know where PLA soldiers opened fire upon civilians were when the civilians were armed and shooting at them first. Whereas the American national guard was much more willing to fire fully-automatic rifles into crowds to kill unarmed people indiscriminately.