Remembrances of China Past : THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, <i> By Andrea Barrett (Pocket Books: $18.95; 252 pp.)</i> : AVENUE OF ETERNAL PEACE, <i> By Nicholas Jose (E. P. Dutton: $18.95; 288 pp.)</i>

Just about everybody has lost interest in China these days. With the familiar propaganda of the Communist Party ascendant and dissidents silent, the China story has grown tedious. The tanks that quelled pro-democracy demonstrators first shocked, then distanced Americans, who at any rate were soon diverted by upheaval in Eastern Europe and war in the Middle East. In the context of dramatic developments around the world, China seemed almost to move backwards.

Even when journalists perceived the incremental political changes that accompany a surface deadlock between reformist and conservative leaders, such accumulating tensions lend themselves neither to headlines nor to the sorts of images that flash across television screens.

Package tours and business deals alike languish now that China has lost the double promise of romance and profit. The first significant novelistic treatments of the foreigner’s fascination with Beijing before its latest nightmare make perfect reading in such a lull. By recapturing the powerful impact of the China experience, Andrea Barrett and Nicholas Jose confront us with the fickleness of our cultural affections, exhuming, as from a distant past, the lure of the Middle Kingdom.

China invariably changes the outsiders who choose to live in its midst. Grace Hoffmeier, the narrator of Andrea Barrett’s engaging third novel, “The Middle Kingdom,” is no exception.

The wife of a prominent biologist attending an international conference on acid rain, she arrives in Beijing in 1986, phrase book in hand. “I knew about China what any other earnest, middle-aged visitor might: rather more than a billion people lived there, elbow to elbow, skin to skin. . . . I knew dates and proper names and phrases so worn they came dressed in capital letters; which is to say I knew nothing at all.”

Already estranged from her husband, irritated by the endless shopping and picture-taking jaunts expected to occupy delegation spouses, she chafes at the incongruous splendor of the tourist hotel in the Western Hills, whose “glassed-in central atrium and jutting wings seemed pleasing at first, walling us off from everything.” Within days, the hotel becomes a prison to be escaped only in the company of an official guide and an entourage of other wives. From a minibus window, Grace glimpses behind the dust the construction sites, the ubiquitous walls, a life she cannot imagine and yearns to enter.

A bout with pneumonia, always the scourge of travelers in north China, leaves her stranded at the former Peking Union Medical College hospital, while biologists and wives travel on to admire China’s ancient splendors. There she receives the motherly care of Dr. Yu Xiaomin, a research biologist alert to Grace’s emotional distress.

For four feverish days and nights Grace hazily absorbs snatches of Dr. Yu’s life story, enough to grasp the years of deprivation endured by intellectuals after China’s liberation. She also surveys in delirious counterpoint the wreckage of her own past, an expanse of wasted energy and missed opportunity that has been self-imposed rather than externally inflicted. Recovering to find her husband involved in a love affair with another conference delegate, she jettisons the failures that have led to her compulsive eating and reflexive self-deception and remains in Beijing to work in Dr. Yu’s laboratory.

Alternating scenes from past and present powerfully convey the awakening and renewal that often have characterized the unwitting foreigner’s China passage. As the ghosts of her past disappear in the clamor of the Beijing streets, Grace discovers for the first time that life has meaning and purpose. “The chaos. The noise. The sense that every person I spoke to held the end of a thread that tied into the web of life I’d been too lost to perceive.”

Her sojourn ends abruptly with the terror of June 4, 1989: which forces her reluctant decision to return to “what had once been home.”

Frantic to find her guardian in a city awash with fear and rumor, she cycles to the hospital, past burning vehicles and soldiers clearing away heaps of rubble, her 2-year-old son strapped to her back. After threading her way through once-familiar corridors littered with wounded and streaming with blood, she understands that for the moment her presence puts others at risk. To insist on staying would be to jeopardize Dr. Yu, who has “helped me discover how I fit into the world.” She can only clutch the child, fathered in a stolen moment by Dr. Yu’s youngest son, and know that what China has taught her remains within.

Nicholas Jose penetrated far more deeply into Chinese society during his stint from 1987 to 1990 as the cultural counselor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.

In the stunning narrative pastiche of “Avenue of Eternal Peace , “ he records his insights, charting not only the personal journey of Wally Frith, an Australian physician tremulously undertaking a year of oncological research at Peking Union Medical College following his wife’s death from cancer, but also the human landscape of Beijing at a moment of profound and ultimately explosive discontent. With reverberating irony, the novel borrows its title from the central thoroughfare through the Chinese capital that in June of 1989 was nicknamed “Blood Alley.”

Initially, Wally’s only contact with China is through intermittent visits from his foreign handler, a familiar type rendered with deft humor, who deals out an array of ID cards, offers vague promises of a welcoming banquet, then leaves him to stare at useless guidebooks in an empty room.

He first encounters the pulsing life of the city when he ventures into a packed restaurant on New Year’s Eve, only to be enfolded by guests consuming quantities of fiery liquor at a wedding dinner. Outside he is accosted by Eagle, one of the young banqueters who has just struggled in halting English to explain the mysteries of gigong, “the breathing power” believed to accomplish such feats as shrinking tumors and causing men to fly through the air.

This chance meeting begins Wally’s unmasking of the pleasant and impassive face that China offers to visiting foreigners. In the wintry Beijing night, stumbling from drink, his unexpected responses are conveyed in vivid, imagistic prose. “The Bulky coat, the muffling darkness, the frozen air and the obscure shapes of frames and recesses had an essential Chineseness that he suddenly loved as he was enfolded by the empty street.”

Wally’s search for renewed purpose after his personal tragedy takes the form of a quest for an aged Chinese cancer specialist, Dr. Hsu Chien Lung, whose earlier research findings the young Australian post-doctoral student had discovered at Harvard. Wally, almost convinced at moments that the old man does not exist, finally is escorted to the family home in the charming canal city of Xiaoxing. His inquiries have led to a haunting love affair with Dr. Hsu’s daughter, who ultimately refuses a proposal of marriage, determined to retain her links with a troubled past and remain in China.

For Wally, the year has been at once an exorcism and a rite of passage that prepares him to return home to his scientific work, his equilibrium restored. As he boards the airplane in early 1987, demonstrations continue in central Beijing, foreshadowing the massive outpouring of popular sentiment two years later.

Many of his friends, presumably deftly drawn composites of the author’s own companions--those who meet on the boundaries where foreign and Western lives intersect--have become actively involved. One was “detained without trial until the fun died down, (then) branded a counter-revolutionary and locked up for 15 years, along with his democratic dreams.”

Jose’s brilliant novelistic portrait of China on the brink of monumental change ends with a scene that will forever be read as prelude: “In Tian An Men Square the crowds continued to tramp across the frozen moat, under the red arch and the dead leader’s portrait, and video cameras installed by the security forces, to visit the Forbidden City.”