I'm going to generalize a bit here but essentially the Tiananmen protest is still a hugely taboo subject in Chinese politics - Much like the cultural revolution was for a number of years. The area of Tiananmen square is still a hot political area and so the Chinese government tries to stop any potential political activity happening there by for example erecting scaffolds and claiming the walls need 'urgent repairs' to prevent anyone from writing political graffiti on the walls. China however is aware of the massively bad image the military crackdown gave to the rest of the world which may have resulted in the lack of deadly force being used in the recent Hong Kong protests. Freedom is a pretty contested concept so its difficult to say if the Chinese people are any more or less free since 1989. On the one hand there are now an increasing amount of elective officials, mainly in the countryside and the Chinese government experiments in elements of deliberation in some cities, even asking citizens for their opinions on major decisions such as in Chongqing. On the other hand however there is deep widespread corruption and nepotism in Chinese politics that pretty much undermines any of these institutions.

All in all the PRC was founded by a youth movement and so the Chinese government naturally shitted it when they saw mass youth and intellectuals gathering to change the status Quo. Tiananmen is a very hot and heavily censored topic in China and almost no research or books are produced in China about it as a result.

Source: Kerry Brown "Ballot box China" and im on my phone so i don't have the exact source but i think its called "The road to tiananmen"- will edit and update is people are interested

The CCP favors political stability absolutely and always above many other issues. Deng Xiaoping owed coming to power specifically because of the nation's weariness of "revolution" and protest. After Mao's death, and as the Cultural Revolution waned, China had two options available to it: A return to the norm with Deng and his factions or putting power behind the Gang of Four, a political clique that was probably even more Orthodox and hardlined than even Mao himself. If the Gang of Four had come to power then the Cultural Revolution would not have stopped as it did under Hua Guofeng. The masses were definitely fed up with protest, chaos, near anarchy, and economic loss and the Deng faction had the mandate it needed to come to power. Hua's indecisiveness and inability to move forward from Mao's policies eventually led to his dismissal as well. That said, Deng had come to power with the mandate of economic growth as well as economic, political and personal stability.

So, approximately two decades later Deng Xiaoping has been unable to uphold one of his mandates, that of economic and political stability. China once again began suffering major protests. The political justification for suppressing Tienanmen had its origins in Deng's suppression of the Gang of Four and the elements of the Party that wouldn't put down their arms as the Cultural Revolution waned.

Post Tienanmen the CCP has had a very explicit party line of maintaining more even handed "tide that lift's all boats" economic development. They also began adopting an even more nationalist character an promoted Patriotism, especially directed towards the Japanese. The way they handle national security also drastically changed, with the CCP being very careful to nip early signs of potential social disrupt in the bud before they can even be tipped off.

To put it more bluntly, one of the policies of the CCP is literally "make everything better for everyone to justify our continued existence". While Tienanmen probably influenced this heavily, the protests of 89 and the fall of the USSR a short time later solidified this political line.

Did the people of China have more or less freedom than before the protest?

Kinda, some of it attributed to Tienanmen, some of it to Deng's reforms. It was Deng who dismantled the commune system and allowed family owned farms to return and opened up small scale capitalism. The CCP now accepts and encourages low level political protest to degrees that they deem reasonable, with the problem being what they deem to be reasonable or not is unique to every situation. China has access to mostly the exact same goods and consumer items that anyone else does that, during Mao, they never would have. Mao promoted class struggle ("class struggle is the key link") above all else, Deng retired class struggle for industrial and technological gains. Point being, there has been a steady increase in various "freedoms" since the change in political lines and I couldn't say if modern reforms are attributed to Tienanmen or the already existing trends.

Source:

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China

edit

Also, to expand on my post here also in this thread, during the 80s there was a schism brewing in the CCP between those that were in favor of economic reforms but wanted small to moderate and planned liberalization (the recently deceased Deng Liqun being an example of someone who advocated for very conservative reforms), and those that endorsed wide open "damn the torpedoes" market liberalizations (Zhao Ziyang). The latter resulted in the economic issues I mentioned in the linked comment and the suppression of Zhao Ziyang, as well as the Tienanmen event, most likely influenced the above mentioned "tide that lifts all boats" economic planning.

I'm breaking a bit of the rules re: opinions with the "most likely" type of comments in my response, but since there is no absolute document from the CCP that says these things explicitly, correlation will have to suffice.

While not exactly representative of the general people. The Chinese leadership are extremely conscious of such acts occurring again. Increasing policing on the anniversary of such events. Carefully controlling search terms including slang terms. Also the member of the politburo who is charged with maintaining security is incredibly important role with a large amount of funds to maintain the order. The new emporers - Kerry Brown is the basis for my comment and is a good book for people more interested in this however the first 100 pages are less interesting than the profiles of the new members of the ruling council.

From a Chinese perspective on the Tiananmen protests (and that time period in general, as well as the Cultural Revolution), I highly recommend Yu Hua's "China in 10 Words"

Here's an extract:

The mass movement that had begun to sweep across the country quickly subsided amid the gun fire. On themorning of June 4. In October of that year, when I visited Peking University, I found myself in a different world, where engagement with affairs of state was nowhere to be found. After nightfall, courting couples appeared by the lakeside and the clatter of mahjong tiles and the drone of English words being memorised were the only sounds that wafted from dorm windows. In the short space of one summer everything had changed so much that it seemed as though nothing at all had happened that spring. Such a huge contrast demonstrated one point: that the political passions that had erupted in Tiananmen—political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution—had Finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone united in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome. After that, new vocabulary started sprouting up everywhere—netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, laid-off workers, migrant laborers, and so on—slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept that was “the people.” During the Cultural Revolution, the defnition of “the people” could not have been simpler, namely “workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, merchants”—“merchants” meaning not businessmen but, rather, those employed in commercial ventures, like shop clerks. Tiananmen, you could say, marked the watershed between two different conceptions of “the people”; or, to put it another way, it conducted an asset reshuffle, stripping away the original content and replacing it with something new."

The book goes into a lot more depth and approaches it from several perspectives over its length

Here's a PDF copy, and hard copies can be found in libraries, etc. DLink： http://pan.baidu.com/s/1i3KN5Y1 Pass： dx88 (type this into the box marked "请输入提取密码")