Bush Wins Battle on China Students; Senate Backs Veto : Congress: Intensive lobbying pays off 24 hours after House voted 390-25 to override veto. Action gives Bush latitude to continue restoring contacts with Beijing.

President Bush defeated a determined congressional challenge to his policy towards China on Thursday when the Senate sustained a presidential veto of legislation aimed at protecting Chinese students in the United States.

The Senate vote was 62 to 37 in favor of overriding Bush’s veto. Proponents of the legislation on Chinese students thus fell four votes short of the two-thirds majority that would have been needed to pass the bill over Bush’s opposition. On Wednesday, the House voted 390 to 25 in favor of an override.

Senate Republican leaders said the ramifications of the vote extend far beyond U.S. policy towards China.

“This vote may help set the tone for the rest of this session. . . . It’s not China policy, it’s American politics,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Democrats have criticized the Administration for being too tolerant of China’s Communist Party leaders. Dole suggested that the Democratic Party was seeking to undermine the Administration and set up Republican senators for “30-second spots,” a reference to television commercials that would portray the President’s supporters as apologists for China’s bloody suppression of the pro-democracy movement.

Such warnings, accompanied by an intensive lobbying campaign by Bush and his top aides, helped stem the erosion of Republican support from the Administration. The result was a vote largely along partisan lines. Senate Democrats voted 54 to 0 to override Bush’s veto, while Republicans voted 37 to 8 to sustain it. One senator was absent.

The Senate’s action, while it upheld the President’s position, underscored the demise at least for now of the bipartisan support for U.S. policy towards China that has existed for more than two decades.

In an ironic historic turnabout, the Democrats’ complaints that Bush is “kowtowing” to Chinese Communists is a reversal of the pattern 40 years ago, when Republican congressional leaders took a Democratic Administration to task for “losing” China to the Communists.

The Senate vote gives Bush the latitude to continue his policy of restoring contacts with the Chinese regime of Deng Xiaoping. It also appeared to clear the way for continued educational and cultural exchanges between China and the United States, which Chinese leaders had threatened to cut off if Bush’s veto had been overridden.

However, the narrow margin of the victory underscored the widespread unpopularity of Bush’s efforts at restoring high-level contacts with the Chinese leadership so soon after Chinese troops crushed the pro-democracy movement at Tian An Men Square. Even some of the Republican senators supporting the President warned Thursday that China should ease its repressive policies and make new concessions to the United States.

“The President knows that he does not have an unlimited time to produce positive results from China,” said Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N. Mex.).

The proposed legislation would have lifted the requirement, contained in current U.S. law, that Chinese students must return home for two years after completing their studies in this country. The measure was proposed last summer by California Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) after Chinese students here said they feared they would be subject to retaliation for giving support to last spring’s massive pro-democracy demonstrations in China.

When Bush vetoed the bill last November, he took administrative action which he said provided to the 40,000 Chinese students in this country the same protection that would have been afforded by the legislation.

But Chinese students argued that the President’s administrative action might be of only temporary help, and Democratic leaders agreed. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said Thursday that Bush’s administrative action “can be revoked by the President or the attorney general at any time, at their discretion.”

After taking part in the nationwide lobbying effort, Chinese activists in Los Angeles said they were disappointed to hear of the Senate vote. “It’s too bad,” sighed Claremont College graduate student Lin Changsheng. “We want legislative protection.” Lin said that his colleagues believe Pelosi’s bill to be superior to Bush’s administrative order.

Bush told reporters he was “very, very pleased” with the Senate vote. At the same time, he said, “We will continue to urge the People’s Republic of China to recognize the human rights of its citizens to participate in the affairs of the world community.” After the vote, Bush invited the House and Senate Republicans who voted with him to a reception at the White House.

The Administration’s victory in sustaining the veto followed what several senators and congressional aides characterized as the most intensive White House lobbying blitz of Bush’s year-old presidency.

Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu all contacted wavering Republican senators. Former President Richard M. Nixon and Lee Atwater, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, also took part in the lobbying effort.

“They used threats and persuasion, and the President put his personal prestige on the line. They went after everybody, and no one was immune,” said an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

“They set up every booby-trap they could think of,” added Sen. William L. Armstrong (R-Colo.).

Before the debate, Armstrong and Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) both calculated that they had 12 Republicans lined up to vote against the President--one vote more than would have been necessary, when combined with the Democratic majority, to override the veto. But the morning of the debate, four of those senators succumbed to either the pressure or the persuasion exercised by the White House.

Gorton refused to “tattle on my colleagues” by divulging the names of the Republicans who switched sides at the last minute. But congressional sources said that senators singled out by the White House for intensive lobbying included Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, John McCain of Arizona, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Mark O. Hatfield and Bob Packwood, both of Oregon.

In the end, only eight Republican senators voted against the Administration. Among them was Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who had been campaigning for governor in California early this week but flew back to Washington on Wednesday night.

The four hours of floor debate Thursday were unusually impassioned. At one point, Kennedy engaged in a shouting match with Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), who was defending Bush. “The President of the United States knows a good deal more about China than either of us,” Chafee declared.

Several senators resorted to extraordinary language to denounce the Chinese leadership.

“The President believes we can do business with those butchers,” Gorton said. “The butchers now believe they can get what they want and hold onto their brutality.” Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), the floor manager for the Administration’s position, said he, too, felt that Chinese leaders had “butchered young men and women in Tian An Men Square.”

Opponents of the Administration went a step further, denouncing the two trips to Beijing by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in July and December that restored high-level contacts with the Chinese leadership.

“The sight of Brent Scowcroft and (Deputy Secretary of State) Lawrence Eagleburger clinking glasses with these leaders, (Chinese Premier) Li Peng and the others . . . made me sick,” said Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.).

However, several Administration supporters defended these overtures. Domenici said the two Scowcroft missions to Beijing were aimed “at a renewal of the pro-democracy movement in China as soon as possible.”

It was the most important vote on American policy towards China since 1979, when Congress, angered by the way in which the Carter Administration had restored diplomatic relations with China, passed the Taiwan Relations Act to provide new protections and military support for Taiwan.

Ironically, at that time Bush--then preparing to run for the Republican presidential nomination--was among the critics of the Carter Administration. In December, 1978, in public interviews and in an article for the Washington Post, Bush complained that President Carter had given away too much to the Chinese leadership and had not gotten enough in return.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Michael Ross in Washington, and Elizabeth Lu in Los Angeles, contributed to this story.