To Shoot or Not to Shoot: Posttotalitarianism in China and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Democratic revolutionary movements in China, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) started similarly, as nonviolent, mass-based protests against hard-line regimes. Yet little more than a decade later the massacre at Tiananmen Square in China and the triumphant revolutions of eastern Europe appear to have left little in common. The subsequent direction of these countries could hardly have been more different. After ordering the army to shoot peaceful protesters, China's Communist rulers executed or imprisoned hundreds of democratic activists, while forcing others underground or into exile. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany the order to fire at unarmed demonstrators never came, and the Communist regimes collapsed. Although neither country still exists, their territorial remnants, including Slovakia after recent elections, have democratized.' The eastern European democratizations are often seen as one single snowball, as Adam Przeworski has phrased it.2 Differences between negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary and revolutionary situations in East Germany and Czechoslovakia have been minimized, and the possibility of bloody repression in the latter two countries at the time has been largely ignored. Democracy in eastern Europe is viewed instead as the inevitable result of the political avalanche unleashed by Gorbachev's liberalization policies in the Soviet bloc.3 Because Deng was not a political liberalizer like Gorbachev, the suppression of the Chinese democracy movement is seen as equally predetermined in a nondemocratic direction. Yet China did not have the hard-line Communist leadership. Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's leaders were equally unyielding, despite Gorbachev's hints that they should undertake reform. It is easy to forget the widespread fear that the East German and Czechoslovakian protesters would suffer the same fate as Chinese student demonstrators. Such Angst was deliberately cultivated by the GDR regime, which had nothing but praise for the Chinese government's defeat of counterrevolution. Opposition leaders and ordinary demonstrators took these threats seriously.4 On October 9, 1989, the fateful day in Leipzig, where tens of thousands were preparing to demonstrate peacefully against the regime, Honecker welcomed Chinese Deputy Premier Yao Yilin to East Berlin and lauded the crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square. Another East German politburo member warned two Protestant church officials that Beijing was far away from Berlin only geographically. In Leipzig itself, in addition to the regular police, the workers' militia, and the secret police (Stasi), twenty-eight companies