Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).

Ah, well, no worry in any case.

What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.

As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that's something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss -- the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square -- the CPC told the truth.

Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven't seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I'm not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it's very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn't see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.

Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of "Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press," which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn't seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we're not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was -- if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it's quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that's a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.

In terms of victims who have been identified, let's look again at Wikipedia:

The Tiananmen Mothers, a victims' advocacy group co-founded by Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose children were killed by the government during the crackdown, have identified 202 victims as of August 2011. In the face of government interference, the group has worked painstakingly to locate victims' families and collect information about the victims. Their tally had grown from 155 in 1999 to 202 in 2011. The list includes four individuals who committed suicide on or after 4 June for reasons related to their involvement in the demonstrations.[citation needed][g]

Former protester Wu Renhua of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an overseas group agitating for democratic reform in China, said that he was only able to identify and verify 15 military deaths. Wu asserts that if deaths from events unrelated to demonstrators were removed from the count, only seven deaths among military personnel might be counted as from being "killed in action" by rioters.

As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being "killed in action" by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn't be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn't being killed "in action," though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn't matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.

More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that's taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I'm not saying they should have every name -- Tank Man hasn't been identified either, though he also wasn't killed -- but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.

Anyway, I still don't have much to say about the tallying business because it's honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that's fair enough on your part).

*which, let me be clear, isn't some "outside agitators" thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.

Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!