I was nine when it happened, not the capital city but the students in lines walked through our elementary school.
It needed to be confessed by CCP no doubt, i mean cracked down by PLA was big mistake, but if let those young students take the power, China would became worse.
I don't like CCP, doesn't mean I buy in chaotic democracy like India.
We might need 50 yrs to solve this issue.
If we can change the CPC without bloodshed then I think a majority of Chinese people on all sides would be for it.
But we know it would be likely be chaos and destruction so why risk it? What happened in 1989 could have ended in a lot of ways. But whatever happened happened and China is infinitely wealthier today from Deng's reforms after the uprising. We have no idea what would have happened if the students got their way. It might or might not be better than today. But overall, it is pretty irrelevant to what we see today because what see today is the world's largest economy with its own space station and dominance in industries from cars to ships to new energy -- something they could never imagine back in 1984.
Those students in 1984 never saw what China became and how China has changed. If they knew that China would end up with the world's largest overseas college student population and the world's largest number of outbound tourists spending ever more money on travel than even Americans then I doubt they would have bothered protesting.
In 1984, they though China would remain poor and isolated like North Korea and wanted to become like the West as soon as possible. They didn't know about "color revolutions" back then and what happened to those countries afterwards. They didn't know what the US will do to Iraq and Syria.