What are you arguing?

I'm arguing that any claim that the police was unarmed is perfectly plausible, as this is normal for police in the People’s Republic of China.

I’m saying the people in tanks were not unarmed.

There's absolutely no disagreement about that.

And the students likely didn’t have RPGs.

There's absolutely no disagreement about that.

The police were not unarmed.

Are you sure about that? Where do you have that information from? That would have been most unusual.

It seems our issue is that you believe only one side of this conflict can be reactionary. In this case your view is that the colonists are a progressive political force while the British colonial/mercantile monarchy is conservative. I understand how you could see it this way from a purely political perspective in regards to liberal democracy and monarchism. However, I view political organs like this as superstructural manifestations of a material reality.

The colonists and imperial core of England lived very different lives and their mode of production or the way in which they made their livings were distinct from eachother. This was the beginnings of industrial capitalism in europe and as such it was quite tumultuous. Semi-feudal aristocracies were trying to maintain control of their domestic growing bourgeois (because the growth of the bourgeoisie sapped the rural peasant labor force that created aristocratic wealth as the new proletarian class concrentrated into urban centers) through taxation and direct limitations on business while also regularly going to war with eachother. I'm sure you know the story of how this affected the colonies.

Things in the colonies were different though. Unlike europe they had so much fucking land ripe for plunder and unlike europe their mercantile bourgeoisie was on a far looser leash (at least for a time) due to their lack of direct threat to aristocratic land holding. Also unlike europe the constant flux of migrants meant they HAD to expand. The primarily scots-irish frontiersman were largely landless and sought the frontier because the metropolitan bourgeois could not provide enough work for the shear amount of them. If they did not expand westward and acquire land for these landless and jobless immigrants they might end up with some class conflict of their own. Problem is, the imperial core was sorta broke and especially after the French and Indian War it saw conflict with indigenous peoples as not worth it. The colonies had also become somewhat unprofitable to them by this point (which I think was due to the actions of the colonial bourgeoisie on the east coast but it could have been more of a structural thing and I am mostly making an educated guess here). As a result the British aristocracy did all the things I'm sure you already know about to maintain their way of life and as a result of that the colonist said no fuck you that would make our way of life impossible and revolted.

Do you kind see what I mean when I say both were reactionary now? They were both desperately attempting to maintain their way of life and in the case of the colonial bourgeois, their power and priviledge. I agree that some good and "progressive" ideas came out of the American revolutionary period but we must also analyze why they came about, who's interest they served, and to what extent they were applied.