Gotcha. The post was written in an ambiguous way that made me thing <in Los Angeles at the Republication National Convention> was an event that you were referring to. I think the main differences with the LA riots are:
Relatively few people were killed by the government, and most of them were self defense or unintentional. While perhaps some of the deaths in Tienanmen square were self defense (e.g. the soldier that was lynched and hanged from a burnt out bus), most of them weren't. Most of the people killed in Tienanmen were unarmed.
The US is pretty open about the LA riots. I can Google it and get useful results, I can see pictures of bodies and soldiers on Google images, I can watch documentaries about it on Netflix, if I go to my local library (operated by the government of Los Angeles) I can get books about the riots. Some of the books are even written by soldiers who were there, and the authors use their own names because they aren't afraid of reprisals for talking about what happened. The rules of engagement for soldiers were much more restrictive than they had experienced while deployed to Vietnam or the middle east. (https://thefederalist.com/2017/04/28/learned-civil-unrest-lo...)
