Ok so Tiananmen square had two main elements in the protest:

• Liberals who wanted to go down the US Road entirely instead of just the Dengist approach.
• Maoists who wanted to revert the Dengist reforms entirely.

I have way more sympathy for the second group than I do the first. A more ideal path would have been a re-education of the first group and an integration of the second group into the CPC more directly, but unfortunately this did not occur as protestors became militant.

This is not to excuse the CPC response of course; even in the face of political violence, even reactionary political violence from the first group, the military should have as light of a hand as possible in response, and I don't think this was abided by in the events of 1989. However, I do think it was correct to suppress this movement in the first place in some capacity. The alternative would probably be colour revolution. Look at places like Venezuela and Nepal and Bolivia; they haven't purged their reactionary elements upon socialists reaching power and capitalist coups/regime change become inevitable.