From Bucharest to Beijing

...Ceausescu, in power for close to a quarter of a century, was undoubtedly the crudest of the bunch —and the one most fulsome in his praise of the gerontocracy that lingers on in Beijing...

...With elections promised in May, the Front's announcement that it would put up its own candidates was seen as something of a subterfuge, since most of its members are former prominent functionaries of the Communist Party...

...One of his eight or so special jets, each piloted by foreigners he deemed more trustworthy than any of his own people, was waiting to fly the couple to safety...

...Indeed, Ceausescu and Deng shared the dubious distinction of being the only present-day heads of Communist countries who had ordered troops to shoot into crowds of demonstrators...

...One reason may be that Romania had no revolutionary tradition...

...Ceausescu was a member of the small yet intensely loyal Beijing fan club consisting of the leaders of the East European autocracies...

...It did not prevent him from being driven by a vision—a grandiose picture of Romania as home to 3040 million people competing on equal terms with the nations of Western and Eastern Europe...

...Ceausescu's greatest offense was the nearstarvation of his people...

...In his old age, he may be relying on a small coterie of conservative ideologues, he may seem cruel and stubborn, he may have lost sight of much that he clearly understood at earlier critical junctures...

...Even then dissidents talked about theevils of Ceausescu...

...Elena's problem was that the Cultural Revolution never caught on in Romania...

...There was no mourning for Elena when her body flashed on the television screens, asmall, bullet-riddled heap at the foot of a stone wall several feet away from her husband's corpse...

...An easier equation is Elena and Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, who kept urging the late Great Helmsman to crack down on anyone, including Deng, daring to question him...

...Elena did not possess Jiang Qing's credentials as a glamorous actress, but she had the same lust for power, the love of having people kowtow to her, the revolutionary passion distorted by sloganeering and propaganda taken as gospel...

...They pointedly noted that they might adopt the same tactics if confronted by angry mobs seeking to change the system assuring their personal supremacy...

...There were no Red Guards, only several million Communist Party members, many of whom laughed about their reasons for joining up and spoke derisively, albeit off-the-record, about the despised Securitate...

...In their frustration, they neglected to take into account realities ranging from size to ethnic make-up to revolutionary history to strategies for modernization aimed at countering the constant threat of imminent economic disaster...

...Romania's first real revolution may appear to be over, but almost as soon as Ion Iliescu emerged as "interim President" under the aegis of the Council of National Salvation he became the target of demonstrations by students, rapidly forming opposition parties and ethnic minorities...

...The new regime showed off his private residences in Beijing, Timisoara and elsewhere after his Christmas Day execution...

...These decadent dictators applauded the Chinese crackdown, saying they could well understand Deng Xiaoping's action...

...He and his wife did not hesitate to loot the nationalmuseums of paintings, tapestries and knickknacks, or to pour money into personal foreign bank accounts...

...Certainly that is true for China's dissidents...

...An elaborate monstrosity, it boasts hundreds of rooms, marble staircases and columns, gold-trimmed chandeliers—and a balcony facing an avenue lined with ministry buildings cast in a similar mode...

...They had watched with growing amazement as rebels accomplished all or at least many of their aims in one Eastern European country after another—and appeared embarrassed that even Ceausescu and his regime should have fallen so swiftly while their compatriots in China were the ones forced to run, weary and fearful of keeping up the struggle...

...The second time the Ceausescus commandeered a passing car and tried to hide in the countryside, where farmers cornered them in a grain silo...

...The Nazis dominated the land during World War II, and the Russians poured in after the agreements reached by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Yalta in 1945...

...They talked of "next spring" being a time of "first" anniversaries, beginning with the protests that had marked the funeral last April of Hu Yao Bang, the reformist Party chief ousted in January '87...

...The veteran of purges, the mastermind of economic reforms, the man who was most responsible over the past decade for opening China to the West in the proverbial spirit of "pragmatism" remains a hero to many in his country—and abroad...

...Deng watched the mobs on Tiananmen Square swell for three weeks before sending in the tanks...

...Shadows accosted me after dusk, handing me mysterious notes detailing their ordeals and beseeching me for help...

...Like Mao in China, Ceausescu saw Romania catching up in one Great Leap...

...I became aware of them when, by complete chance, I made my initial visit to both countries in the winter of 1978...

...In the crunch, however, the soldiers did as they were told, the Army held together and the generals won Deng's praise...

...According to the charges at the military tribunal that convicted the Ceausescus, 60,000 were executed during their rule...

...As Romanians fill the streets challenging the successors to Ceausescu, Chinese students in Beijing, no less than the two who were moved to come here, can only look upon them with undisguised envy for what they have already won...

...On the way back, we had to spend a week seeing the sights in Romania as part of the deal struck with the travel agent...

...They provided lucrative posts, too, for offspring, in-laws and sundry distant relatives...

...To this day FDR is blamed here for selling out the country to the USSR, which annexed much of Moldavia, home of about 4 million Romanians now growing increasingly restive under Soviet rule...

...The Chinese do not yet have the luxury of wondering whether the successors to Deng and his protégés are much di f ferent—or better...

...But if Madame Mao was equally petty and corrupt, she nonetheless escaped a death sentence because that might have made her a martyr to the many Chinese who continued to admire her...

...Ironically, the hardest hit were the newborns Ceausescu presumably very much wanted most to nurture...

...So as I witnessed his collapse in Bucharest, I was not surprised that he looked to China for refuge...

...True, corruption is high on the list of the protesters' charges in China as well...

...unlike Mao, he could not fail and remain a symbol of radical revolutionism...

...The Chinese students on the train hoped eventually to bring home some lessons on how the rebels in Romania had such stunning success...

...The absence of a Long March, of a war against the Japanese, deprived Ceausescu of the revolutionary aura that made Mao, Deng and their co-marchers national heroes...

...They had seen a revolution that worked, and they thought it could be repeated in their own country...

...It did not seem odd to me that by the dawn of the '90s the links between Bucharest and Beijing had become increasingly clear—that the tightly controlled Chinese press, for instance, evinced greater interest in Romanian developmentsthanin the various liberating pronouncements from Moscow...

...Untold numbers of people were killed in Romania in December and China in June...

...Ceausescu, of course, tried to get rid of the demonstrators with rifle-fire as soon as they posed a threat...

...His most audacious display of ego was the unfinished Palace of the Republic...

...One Romanian joked that pigs got better treatment— they were housed in well-heated pens to guarantee their growing fat and healthy enough for export...

...No one felt the slightest sympathy for this woman, who called herself the nation's leading scientist and had the effrontery to run the Council for Science and Technology, even though she had flunked out of elementary school...

...The two could not help feeling it was hardly fair that the mood of optimism sweeping Tiananmen Square in May had proven so illusory when, as they saw it, the Chinese camping out there had set an example for Eastern Europe...

...He personally barked out orders to the architects and engineers, making them redo the grand staircase in the entrance hall eight times before he was satisfied...

...Since 1978, numerous reporting assignments had taken me to the ideologically compatible capitals...

...Although Chinese dissidents may disagree, the case could be made that Ceausescu also was more vindictive and selfaggrandizing than his Chinese counterparts...

...But the overloaded helicopter had to come down twice...

...Millions may have died in the violent traumas China has experienced over the last 40plus years...

...Over a decade later, Ceausescu hoped for asylum in Beijing when he and Elena, accompanied by two bodyguards and two Party loyalists, took off from the roof of the Communist Party headquarters in a small white helicopter as an angry crowd shouted in the Palace Square below...

...Yet the type ofpressurehehas generally advocated appears almost gentlemanly compared with the invariably heavy hand of Ceausescu...

...The two young men had traveled from New Jersey and New York —one was a student at Seton Hall, the other at Brooklyn College—to congratulate the leaders of Romania's Council of National Salvation on the overthrow oftheregimeof Nicolae Ceausescu and wifeElena...

...Despite the numbers, the extent of the cruelty in Romania appears to have transcended that in China...

...This spring, "they told me, "it will happen in Beijing...

...During his 24 years in power he became adept at killing or torturing his severest critics, and placing once-trusted advisers in jail or under house arrest...

...More important, Ceausescu's soldiers were not only troubled by having to fire into the crowds in Timisoara, the city in Transylvania where the revolt began, but less than a week later in Bucharest the Army had totally changed sides and Ceausescu was attempting to flee...

...Comparisons between Romania and China may appear extraordinarily abstruse, but the connections, reflected in the level of repression, were always there...

...His policy of madly exporting agricultural and industrial products meant that Romanians had to endure the agonies of scant heat and little meat...

...There was talk of troops reluctant to act, of potential clashes between one regional division or another...

...Still, somehow it is difficult to equate Deng with Ceausescu...

...Thus the sense persists that Romania has experienced merely the opening round of its revolution, that the real war may lie ahead...

...Meanwhile, the dictator filled his own coffers in numerous ways...

...Last May and June I watched the promising events in Tiananmen Square turn into bloodshed and despair...

...Beijing was full of rumors about splits within the People's Liberation Army last May...

...Donald Kirk, a longtime NL contributor who writes for USA Today, hasjust returned from a stay in Eastern Europe...

...Thanks to the Romanian airline, Tarom, and a clever New York City travel agent, our tour group to China—then on the verge of opening up to an onslaught of Western businessmen and globe trotters—flew first to Bucharest for a couple of days before continuing to Beijing...

...No one doubts that Chinese bureaucrats have begun to enrich themselves, that private entrepreneurs earn far more than do faithful servants of State institutions, that the sons and daughters of certain high officials manage to find jobs exceeding their qualifications...

...I stayed on in Bucharest after the others left...

...They have not even come close to accomplishing their initial goal—the destruction of the regime that ruthlessly suppressed them last spring...

...Now, said the students, it was the turn of the Chinese to follow the example of those who had emerged victorious...

...He had banned birth control in his zeal to raise the country's population from its current 23 million to 30 million by the end of the decade...

...Yet thousands of infants died in hospitals from lack of enough medicine, food or warmth...