COLUMN RIGHT : Liberty Rides on China’s Trade Status : We can press for reform by raising a few key tariffs.

The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party rose to power through force and violence, without the consent of those they govern. For more than 40 years, these leaders have maintained themselves in power through the same means.

They massacred Chinese workers and young people, at Tian An Men Square, peacefully assembled in their own capital.

They have secretly imprisoned, without charge or trial, thousands of their people whose only wish was for the democratic freedoms desired by all mankind.

They have created the world’s largest system of slave-labor camps--with millions of inmates, according to uncontested testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--flooding international markets with a variety of products.

They have secretly begun construction of a nuclear-weapons plant in Algeria and sold to Pakistan ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons--thereby threatening regional peace and security.

They have invaded and occupied their neighbor, Tibet, to the point that it may be dead as a nation and as a culture.

They have armed the Khmer Rouge, causing the deaths of more than a million people and the destruction of Cambodia.

They have violated every internationally accepted standard of human rights and democracy.

It is imperative that such dangerous and inhumane behavior cease.

The United States is obliged to exert the kind of leadership necessary to bring this savagery to an end. If the United States has learned anything from the Gulf War, it is that, without President Bush’s courageous decision to force the issue, Kuwait would still be under Iraqi occupation. Similarly, Congress can force the issue in China by refusing to renew most-favored-nation trading status.

Since China is a nuclear weapons state, and for other reasons, the United States does not have the option of military force. However, the United States does have the leverage provided by the enormous, open American market, upon which China’s Communist leaders are becoming more and more dependent for the precious hard currency they need to hold onto power.

Removal of the privilege of the most-favored-nation status would instantly subject most Chinese imports to the full effect of our 1930 tariff law.

Between 1988 and 1990, the value of footwear imported from China increased threefold. Under current tariffs, certain kinds of footwear now enter the United States at a 6% ad valorem rate of duty; without most-favored status that duty would rise to a prohibitory 35%.

Toys now coming into the United States at 7.8% would face a 70% tariff. Cotton bathrobes would face a rise in tariffs from 9.5% to 90%. Toys, textiles and footwear, among the most likely products of the slave-labor-camp system, lead the list of U.S. imports from China.

Not all products imported from China would be affected by removal of the trade status. For example, tin, a significant import, would remain duty free. Abolition of the status, therefore, would not be a protectionist gambit, but a powerful inducement to the Chinese Communist leaders to abandon the criminal and degrading practice of slave labor and to cease arming unstable regions of the world.

Although the argument based on human rights is the most important justification for withholding the favored-nation status, there are other reasonable arguments:

First, Communist China is not a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, thus has no claim to permanent favored-nation status.

Second, such a status for China is dependent upon a key test of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the trade bill of 1984--freedom to emigrate. The millions of unfortunates unjustly held in slave-labor camps are clearly denied this freedom.

Third, on April 26, U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills named Communist China as the world’s No. 1 thief of U.S. intellectual property. Her agency estimates American losses in pirated books, music recording and computer software to be at least $400 million annually. Losses in the pharmaceutical area are likely to drive the final figure well above half a billion dollars.

Finally, and most important, as the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has pointed out, the Chinese leadership has been engaged in a policy of discrimination against U.S. products ever since the Tian An Men massacre.

Removal of the trade status would force the Communist Chinese leadership to choose between freedom and oppression, between having access to the U.S. market and continuing arms sales to unstable areas. The U.S. market can be worth $20 billion a year to the Chinese in total sales, but arms sales bring them only $2 billion to $3 billion.

One suspects that the Chinese, being astute businessmen, will not be long in choosing.