COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : China Mugs Democracy, We Send Presents : The tariff break means more slave-made goods for export.

At midnight on June 3, the campus of Beijing University echoed to the sound of breaking bottles. This was protest by pun: In Chinese, a small bottle is xiao ping, which sounds the same as the given name of China’s maximum leader, Deng Xiaoping. A few miles away, in the inner sanctums of the Communist Party, it is more likely that Deng and his cronies were celebrating the anniversary of the 1989 Beijing massacre to the sound of popping champagne corks: They had just received the most welcome of anniversary presents--the announcement by George Bush that China’s most-favored-nation trade status will be renewed for another year.

The public rationale for Bush’s China policy is that the United States should not turn its back on “nations that aren’t wholly free yet,” but instead practice what, in the Reagan years, used to be called “constructive engagement.”

U.S. policy has followed this approach since July, 1989, a month after the massacre, when National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger made their first secret trip to Beijing. The only new element is the explicit desire to reward China for its helpful votes on Iraq in the U.N. Security Council. One does not have to be the proverbial rocket scientist to conclude that such a quid pro quo was probably on Beijing’s mind at the time.

The past two years have given abundant proof of the folly of U.S. policy. Deng and his cronies have quite clearly interpreted U.S. indulgence as a green light to their worst impulses.

The abandonment of U.S. sanctions has helped the Chinese leadership stabilize its sagging economy. Inflation, which was a crucial spark for the 1989 protests, has been brought under control. Industrial growth is soaring, exports are up sharply. Last year China ran a U.S. trade surplus of more than $10 billion.

Betrayal is an overused word in politics, but there are times when no other will do. Fresh from his betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, Bush has now ditched those democrats whom the Chinese Stalinists call the “black hands” of Tian An Men Square. In a series of show trials in January and February, dissident intellectuals Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming were jailed for 13 years each; human-rights advocate Ren Wanding got seven years; historian Bao Zunxin, five; student leader Guo Haifeng, four.

And that was only the most public face of the crackdown. Workers, whose protests always scared Deng more than those of the students and intellectuals, have fared much worse. At least 45 have been executed for their part in the events of 1989, and countless others have vanished into the vast Chinese gulag.

There, it appears, they may now be employed in making the cheap blue jeans, toys and machine tools that will flood the U.S. marketplace as a result of MFN tariff privileges. In April, Asia Watch unearthed a number of articles from a “restricted circulation” Chinese journal that show how prison labor is being used to produce cheap products for export markets in Japan, West Germany and the United States. (The importing of goods produced by prison labor contravenes the 1930 U.S. Tariff Act.)

There is an Alice in Wonderland illogic to all this. In China, those convicted of “subverting the socialist system” are flung in jail as “capitalist roaders.” Once there, they prove to be a wonderful asset to the Western-oriented export economy since, as one proud official notes, they earn miserable wages, “cannot join labor unions (and) do not enjoy retirement benefits.” And all this takes place in the economic sector that Bush points to as the best evidence of China’s progressive reforms.

The Soviet Union, which is now eager to embrace a Harvard-designed package of market reforms, is still denied MFN privileges. Yet China, grotesquely, is rewarded for practicing an unholy mixture of the ugliest aspects of both capitalism and communism.

A new Chinese film, “Ju Dou,” tells the story of a young woman and her lover enslaved and brutalized by the owner of a dye mill in rural China in the 1920s. On the surface it’s a love triangle, a revenge thriller, but it’s hard not to see the deeper allegory. The Chinese authorities have banned the film, perhaps because the figure of the stupid, vicious old man reminded them uncomfortably of themselves.

Watching the film on the second anniversary of the Beijing massacre, one feels that the allegory would be complete if another character were added: the cynical foreign landlord who turns a blind eye to the abuses at the mill in exchange for a share of the profits. In the short time that remains to them to challenge Bush’s renewal of MFN, members of Congress might find it worthwhile to arrange a screening.