One might have hoped that a benevolent illiberal ruler, when confronted with peaceful demands for democracy, would simply say "No." and ignore the protesters except in so far as they were creating a public nuisance.

In America, we have grown jaded towards protests because they don't ever accomplish anything. But at their most powerful, protests become revolutions. If Deng would have just ignored the protesters indefinitely, the CCP would have fallen. Perhaps the protest could have been dispersed without loss of life, but it's only very recently that police tactics have advanced to the point of being able to disburse large groups of defensively-militarized protesters without killing people. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model and compare to the failure of the police at the Seattle WTO protests of 1999.

This is a recent story about Deng's supposed backing of Tiananmen violence. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world/asia/05china.html?_r=1