Kowtowing to the Wrong Chinese at the Wrong Time : Policy: George Bush bowed to hard-liners instead of making the world safer for the democratic voices stifled by Beijing oppression.

There must be disappointment in the White House that trench-coated Brent Scowcroft and his traveling companion Lawrence S. Eagleburger had to cancel their midnight mission to Bucharest. Had Nicolae Ceausescu and family not fled on Friday by helicopter from the roof of the presidential palace, the furtive pair would have told Romania’s leader of “the United States’ shock and concern about the violence” that left thousands dead throughout Romania. This quotation--which served White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater so well in explaining Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s visit to Beijing while bullet pockmarks were still being cemented over on Tian An Men Square--would have explained the mission.

Also squelched by Ceausescu’s precipitous flight was the six-month follow-up trip by the national security adviser and the deputy secretary of state, a visit announced two hours after midnight, in deference to Romanian sensitivities. Had Ceausescu hung on, the presidential emissaries would have clinked glasses with the great leader, tut-tutted over “negative forces” that momentarily fogged U.S.-Romanian relations and muttered platitudes about friendship.

On the pair’s return, former secretaries of state would have warned of the dangers of isolating a country that has been a friend of the United States for so long, friendship due, in no small part, to the geopolitical jigsaw puzzle that found Ceausescu at odds with the Soviet Union. Thoughtful academics, members of previous administrations, Democratic administrations, would have toasted George Bush’s “act of courageous leadership.” And Bush himself would have told us that “being somewhat familiar with Romania,” he had “no second thoughts” about his initiative.

To the relief of the jubilant Romanian people, Ceausescu’s flight has spared them the ministrations of the Bush Administration. Alas for Chinese, Deng Xiaoping and the men who ordered the slaughter of unarmed people in China’s cities managed to retain power, men only too happy to receive Bush’s messengers.

Bush is fond of telling critics that he knows China and from this knowledge he understands how to deal with the country. In fact, it is hard to think of a country Bush displays less knowledge of than China. Certainly his actions toward Beijing reveal no comprehension of Chinese realities, of the China where manhunts for democratic activists continue, where political indoctrination persists at all levels of society, where the freshman class at Beijing University is forced-marching through a military and political boot-camp, of the China where millions upon millions of books even vaguely sympathetic to the West, to the United States, have been burned. Perhaps the U.S. Embassy in Beijing is not reporting the repression in China, or perhaps Bush has decided to ignore this reality.

The President’s avowed goal--to prevent the “dangerous” prospect of China’s isolation from the world--is a bizarre reading of China’s response in the wake of international condemnation for the June 4 butchery on Beijing’s streets. It would be instructive for Bush to peruse the Chinese press, the screeds denouncing Western values, slurring the motives of the country’s democratic activists, championing the virtues of Leninist terror and Maoist self-reliance. Who is doing the isolating? Not the United States. Beijing’s elderly tyrants are. Through their defiance of international norms of behavior and respect for basic human rights, they have walled themselves off from the world community.

Other explanations, or excuses, for the trip were offered by the Administration--the need to brief the Chinese on the Malta summit, the importance of maintaining a dialogue about Cambodia. The feebleness of these is apparent. More important would have been briefing U.S. allies in the Pacific region on the Malta discussions. Suggestions that Washington exercises any influence over Chinese behavior toward Cambodia, and its support of the genocidal Khmer Rouge are belied by the continued flow of arms to--and diplomatic support for--Pol Pot’s murderers.

Even more disgraceful, from the standpoint of projecting American values, is the covert discussion between the Administration and China on settling the question of the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian, also a physicist. The couple is in protective asylum at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Although Bush and his advisers will not publicly address the matter, those familiar with the discussions say the Administration is amenable to an arrangement that will exile Fang and Li to some backwater neutral country, where he will have no platform for discussing politics. Apart from the fact that muzzling two of China’s foremost democratic activists would constitute slavish pandering to Beijing’s tyranny, even worse, it would represent a grotesque perversion of American principles.

And who are the ones succored by the visit of Bush emissaries? Are they the hundreds of thousands of students and workers who marched for democracy, freedom of expression and more decent lives last spring? Or are they the old men who ordered the tanks to roll over unarmed people last June.

China’s leadership, despite a superficial hard-line homogeneity, is highly unstable, sundered by competing intentions and often conflicting power bases. Those leaders are bound only by the charismatic authority of Deng Xiaoping who, at 85, is in declining health. When Deng passes from the scene, no one, not Bush, the State Department or the Chinese, can anticipate the outcome of what is certain to be a vigorous struggle for power.

Scowcroft and Eagleburger were received by Prime Minister Li Peng, a man detested by China’s intellectuals, intransigent in his views, anti-Western and hostile to the economic restructuring of the past decade that brought China a measure of progress. Clearly Li’s belief--along with other hard-liners--that the bloodshed of June would not cause permanent damage to China’s relations with the West has been borne out by Bush’s hat-in-hand approach to Beijing.

On two immediate grounds, Bush’s initiative is fatally flawed. First, his rapprochement with a leadership loathed by its people reinforces a conviction that continued repression will not only be tolerated but encouraged by the Administration. Second, those forces within China’s polity that desire political liberalization and economic reform, forces being systematically purged, have been visibly abandoned by the Bush Administration.

For his part, Bush reiterates a belief that face-to-face discussion goes far with the Chinese. But from the hard-line Chinese perspective, Bush is performing the ritual kowtow due Chinese leaders by petitioning foreigners. It is not surprising that Chen Zhongjing, a former vice minister of the State Security Bureau and a rigid hard-liner who has been in the United States for three weeks, was visibly gleeful over the Scowcroft-Eagleburger mission. He met with people spanning a spectrum of views on China, from Henry A. Kissinger to Andrew J. Nathan, a Columbia University political scientist who has written extensively on human-rights abuses in China. Chen returned to Beijing last week cheered that his country’s greatest booster in the United States lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

In the final analysis, Bush is not concerned about China realities. He revels instead in clandestine games that were appropriate to the Cold War years, for the intrigue of the pre-Gorbachev era. With the East Bloc daily redrawing the European map, economic, political and strategic, and with Mikhail S. Gorbachev watching so approvingly, Bush’s graceless waltz with Beijing is not merely an affront to decency, it insults the victories of East Germans, Czechs, Poles and Hungarians who have managed the impossible nonviolently.