CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY: FROM THE TIANANMEN SQUARE TO TIMISOARA.

• Author: Szabo, Lucian Vasile

1. Checkpoints in Romania and China

   The year 1989 has been considered remarkable regarding the evolution towards democracy of some states of the world. The evolution or the return to democracy, the respect for human values and fundamental rights became specific in many states of the Central and Eastern Europe. The evolution was peaceful, yet sometimes accompanied by vigorous protests in some states. To Romania, though, it also meant a great deal of bloodshed. In China, other protests have been savagely repressed as well, without causing the regime to change. In Romania, the dictatorial communist regime was abolished, yet, despite the bloody revolution, the evolution towards a profound, multipartite, and coherent democratic system has been slow, as the old regime survived, mostly through people and institutions, while the people and institutions of an open society remained unstable and somehow meretricious. They were being controlled in an authoritarian manner and sometimes by force (as have been the frequent raids of the mineworkers into Bucharest to punish the representatives of the political forces that were hostile to Ion Iliescu, the leader of the country after the fall of Ceausescu, as well as the Front of National Salvation (FNS) as a party). In China, the leading role of the Communist Party stayed a fact, but the year 1989 marked an important change of political and governmental management. Slowly, the political totalitarianism was doubled by an amplification of the opening on the economical level.

   Making an emotional screening of the world's revolutionary movements in 1989, Ralf Dahrendorf notes:

   Yes, there were tears, bitter tears at the massacre of Tiananmen Square which brutally ended the 'democracy movement' of students and workers and even soldiers in China, tears for the victims of Securitate s brutality in Timisoara and elsewhere in Romania six months later (Dahrendorf 2005:6-7). The evolution was different, although one of the greatest fears of the Timisoara people in December 1989, particularly beginning Sunday, December 17, when the repression forces opened fire against the protesters, was to avoid the same fate as the demonstrators from the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Back then, in June 1989, after a month of peaceful protests of the students and other residents of China's capital, the state forces intervened, which did not happen during the period when the protests were rather isolated. The offensive of the forces of repression led to the evacuation of the place, while numerous victims were registered: dead, wounded, and arrested. There were no exact figures of the repression and probably we will never know them. But information about the bloody offensive of the state forces alarmed the whole world, although the Chinese officials made intense, desperate efforts that, both inside the country and outside it, only the official statements got through (Economy 2019). While comparing the repressive actions in Timisoara and Beijing with the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Tom Gallagher (1995:73) notes that the actions of the state forces in Romania were much more intense, which led to a larger number of victims. Yet, despite the large number of the dead and wounded on December 17, 1989, the Timisoara demonstrators continued their protests, and on December 20 they made the Army, the main aggressor on the streets, retreat into the barracks.

   The Romanians found out about the brutal suppression of the protests on the Tiananmen Square, although they also lived in a closed society, with a controlled mass media. Information came from the radios with special programs for Romania (BBC, Free Europe, The Voice of America, Radio France International, Deutsche Welle). But there was also news in the programs of radio and televisions from the neighbouring countries, including the URSS. Considering the resemblance between the dictatorial regimes in Romania and China, the rebelling people of Timisoara, militants in favour of the introduction of democratic measures, had every reason to be afraid. The squares, Tiananmen in Beijing (June 4, 1989), and Liberty in Timisoara (December 17, 1989) are places where guns have been fired and innocent people, including children, fell victim. Yet, in Timisoara, people had gathered a day before in Saint Mary Square, close to the Reformed Church, where the reverend of Hungarian origin, Tokes Laszlo, was seized. That was where the first confrontations with the repression forces took place; at that point, they did not open fire, but used water cannons instead, while making numerous illegal arrests. Despite the fire and despite the ending that was not favourable to democracy in China, the protests of the Timisoara people continued, moving later to the Opera (Victory) Square, which, starting from December 20, was never deserted.

   The squares thus became symbolic places, as Frank Viviano remarked a year after the tragedy in the Tiananmen Square. He talks about the protests in the Slovak National Liberation Square in Bratislava, appreciating that the revolt in Beijing encouraged the Central and Eastern Europeans: "It is clear from dozens of interviews, not only in Czechoslovakia but in Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia, that June 4 is regarded by Eastern Europeans as a crucial spark that helped ignite their own revolution. The euphoria that has reigned here since the end of 1989, when governments fell from Bucharest to Prague, is mixed with a continuing sense of astonishment at the course of events" (Viviano 1990).

2. Similar living conditions

   One of the causes of the fall of the former communist regimes in the states from Central and Eastern Europe was the general economic bankruptcy. Those states were simply unable to find the necessary resources to develop and support the outdated industrial capacities. The services and commerce offered the citizens in these countries insufficient products for daily living, which led to the initiation of the protest movements. There are other causes, of course, among which aspiration to civic liberties and democracy are fundamental. The miserable living conditions played a major role, though. The authoritarian (dictatorial and discretionary) regime and the centralized economy seemed so intertwined that differentiation was minimal. Yet, there were some differences. In the communist camp, Czechoslovakia and Hungary used to have much freer economies than the ones in Romania and Bulgaria. Even today, we note important differences between North Korea and Cuba, as well as between these countries and Vietnam or China. Besides, so far China proved, in a convincing manner, that an authoritarian regime, based on a unique party, as well as an opening to a complex economy can in fact coexist. That is neither centralized (socialist), nor fully free (capitalist). It is a dangerous and, at the same time, odd mixture, whose evolution seems difficult to decipher.

   Until the brutal violence in June 1989 against the protesters in the Tiananmen Square, the Chinese leaders were struggling to build a climate of trust of the foreign investors in China's economy, by offering access to huge resources and by taking advantage of any collaboration in order to be able to develop their own economy (Simon 1990). This economical opening was translated by students and some Chinese dissidents as an opportunity for a reform on the political and civic level and as a possible transition to democracy. To some extent, the Chinese communist regime tolerated that as long as it did not take any concrete vindictive form and did not cast any doubt upon the official system. In universities, centres of debates appeared, emphasizing an attempt to know the values of liberal democracies, yet in connection to the promotion of the Chinese national specificity (Yang 2014). There is also a public agenda, dominated by two important topics, generated by the reform of the academic milieu and of the system of public officials (civil service). As long as those debates took place in closed spaces and could be surveyed and controlled, they were tolerated by the system, as they represented an outlet for the release of some tension accumulated in a retarded and corrupt society, full of contradictions. Romania did not benefit from such type of openness, the forms of release of the accumulated tensions being fewer, as the regime proved more incumbent. This fact also represents one of the explanations for the special kind of violence specific to the pre-democratic actions and, more importantly, to the repression itself.

   In China, the state forces intervened when the debates took the form of street demonstrations. The protesters did not yet have the necessary force to fight against the system, as was the case six months later, in December 1989, in Timisoara. The...