Old Men Riding a Tiger and Feeling Paranoid : China: The leadership that gave us the Tian An Men massacre looks to events in Romania and assesses the outcome with downright alarm.

Timisoara and Tian An Men. The parallels were striking, enough so to make China’s aging oligarchs visibly nervous: An intransigent Communist regime, facing a rising tide of democratic protest fueled by deepening economic contradictions, employs deadly force to halt the spread of “bourgeois liberalization,” in the process slaughtering scores of unarmed civilians.

For the authors of last June’s Beijing massacre, it was, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, “ deja vu all over again”--until the people of Romania dramatically altered the script by overthrowing their Communist government and executing the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. At the point, Chinese nervousness turned to outright alarm.

Already forced on the defensive by their inability--more than six months after the Tian An Men incident--to regain public credibility at home and restore investor confidence abroad, Chinese authorities quickly erected a wall of defiance to shield them against the fallout from the Romanian revolution. Dismissing out of hand all hints of similarity between conditions in Bucharest and Beijing, they quietly beefed up security forces in their capital and placed them on standby alert.

At the same time, government “truth squads” were dispatched to college campuses in Beijing to calm down restive students and to propagate the party line on Romania.

That line is both complex and convoluted. Officially, Beijing’s response to the demise of Ceausescu has been to publicly congratulate the new Romanian government of Ion Iliescu and to pledge continued bilateral friendship and cooperation. Privately, however, Chinese leaders are disseminating to party cadres two radically different versions of the Romanian upheaval--one for domestic consumption (blaming Mikhail Gorbachev for undermining socialism and stirring up political unrest in Eastern Europe) and another designed to assuage the fears of foreigners (presenting a more balanced, neutral view of Ceausescu’s downfall).

Such contorted explanations are unlikely to prove effective. Reports from the Chinese capital indicate that anti-government wall posters have begun to reappear on dormitory buildings at Beijing and Quinghua universities.

Like a proverbial bad penny, memories of Tian An Men keep turning up to haunt China’s leaders. Public anger, generally kept under wraps since the bloody crackdown of June 3-4, has periodically percolated to the surface, attaching itself to convenient symbols of government repression.

Government fears of renewed urban unrest have been further fueled by recent bad news on the economic front. Industrial output plummeted in September and October, resulting in negative growth for the first time in a decade. Some factories have reportedly cut wages and there have been persistent rumors that workers will have to forgo cash bonuses--supplemental income considered vital to survival in an economy marked by fixed low wages and inflationary price hikes. Industrial sabotage and other incidents of passive resistance are said to be on the upswing.

What China’s leaders fear most is the conjoining of student and worker unrest. It was just such a fusion that made possible last spring’s pro-democracy movement, prompting authorities to invoke martial law in Beijing. A similar fusion presaged autumn’s tidal wave of popular protest in Eastern Europe, culminating in the collapse of Communist regimes throughout the region.

Few observers are predicting an imminent recurrence of large-scale political disturbances in China. Yet the mood in Beijing remains strained, with strong undercurrents of indignation.

Beijing’s attempt to sweep the carnage of June 3-4 under the rug was rendered ineffective by the presence of too many eyewitnesses, too many video cameras and fax machines, too many radios tuned to BBC and the Voice of America. It is striking that the citizens of Romania also relied heavily upon BBC, VOA and Radio Free Europe to keep abreast of local and international developments throughout their December upheavals.

In the aftermath of the Romanian revolution, China’s leaders find themselves more isolated and embattled than before. But their rigid, circle-the-wagons attitude bodes poorly for China’s future tranquility.

Nor does it bode well for China’s visibly strained relations with the United States. Since last June, the Bush Administration has taken a calculated risk, making a series of near-term concessions in hopes that the forces of moderation and restraint within China would thereby be strengthened. In the wake of the Timisoara and Bucharest massacres, Bush’s gamble has been angrily assailed as a form of appeasement--or “kowtowing”--by a rising chorus of U.S. congressional and media critics, many of whom are now calling for a tougher line against Beijing.

Against this background of heightened tension at home and increasing isolation abroad, China’s leaders face an uncertain future. Unable to terminate martial law in Beijing for fear of unleashing new urban unrest, yet painfully aware of the fate that befell Bucharest’s unyielding, hard-line Communists, Deng Xiaoping and his associates are riding a tiger. In the aftermath of the Romanian uprising, they are less likely to manage a soft dismount.