U.S. Visit to China Praised and Assailed : Diplomacy: Differing appraisals by China experts foreshadow an emotional debate in Congress.

The Bush Administration’s mission to Beijing was alternately denounced as “bowing and scraping to the butchers of Beijing” and praised as a successful overture during a House subcommittee meeting Wednesday.

The opposing views on last weekend’s surprise visit to China by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger foreshadowed an emotional debate in January when Congress returns.

Although Bush has moved to lift some of the sanctions he imposed immediately after the Chinese regime’s bloody crackdown last June, Congress will consider imposing additional sanctions. Congress is also expected to move to override Bush’s veto of legislation allowing Chinese students a sanctuary in the United States from possible persecution in their homeland.

In an angry exchange before the House subcommittee on international economic policy and trade, subcommittee Chairman Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.) protested the mission as “kowtowing.”

“By bowing and scraping to the butchers of Beijing, the Administration has sent China and the world a message that is not worthy of the world’s greatest democracy,” said Gejdenson.

He also complained that the Administration failed to send anyone to appear before the panel to justify the trip.

“The Bush Administration is willing to send him (Eagleburger) 6,000 miles to China, but not . . . two miles from Foggy Bottom to Capitol Hill,” Gejdenson complained.

Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) angrily responded that “liberals” who favor talks with the Soviets and Latin American countries “appear in this instance to prefer a posture of rhetorical belligerency towards a formidable nuclear power rather than firm, principled dialogue.”

Leach said that the trip prompted China’s pledge not to sell ballistic missiles to Middle Eastern countries. Critics of the trip had responded earlier to that point by noting that the pledge had been made before the chill in U.S.-China relations that followed Beijing’s violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in June.

Two China scholars also gave starkly conflicting testimony about the wisdom of the Administration’s overtures to China.

“China has become a whipping boy,” said A. Doak Barnett, a China specialist for 40 years. “There are a lot of Third World countries with more egregious human rights standards than China.”

Barnett said continued dialogue is essential, adding, “Outside pressures almost certainly will strengthen the hard-liners and weaken the reformers in China.”

He added that while the massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands of demonstrators last June reflected a failure of Chinese leadership, most Chinese officials who favor reform have not been removed from provincial posts despite the imprisonment of student leaders and some of their Communist Party patrons.

But Merle Goldman, a history professor at Boston University, said it is hopeless to expect reform from a “weak, unstable, unpopular” regime of octogenarians who now hold power in China.

“They can’t moderate their behavior or they would lose power,” she contended.

Barnett urged Congress to wait several months before voting for sanctions or overriding Bush’s veto on the Chinese students’ sanctuary bill to see whether the Beijing regime will lift martial law, end jamming of the Voice of America, ease restrictions on foreign journalists or take other steps toward political moderation.

In a possible sign of moderation on the issue of journalists, China has approved a new Voice of America correspondent to replace one expelled after the government crackdown last June, the State Department announced Wednesday.

The State Department said in a statement that “we welcome” the decision to approve Stephanie Mann Nealer’s accreditation, which had been pending since September. Nealer is head of the VOA’s East Asia and Pacific News department.