COLUMN LEFT : The Naive Folly of America’s China Policy : Sure, there are signs aplenty of capitalism at work, but the political situation is bleak.

When the news came in on CNN that the Senate had voted to attach conditions to China’s most-favored-nation-trade status, the television picture in my room at the Beijing Hotel went abruptly blank. The spaghetti on the screen typified the official reaction of outrage that foreigners should presume to interfere in China’s internal affairs.

But beneath this ritual display of anger was a quiet satisfaction that the 55-44 vote was not enough to block a presidential veto. The laoren bang, the “gang of old men” who run China, see George Bush as their kind of guy--even if the 87-year-old Deng Xiaoping, whose mental lapses have begun to assume Ronald Reagan-like proportions, is reported to confuse him at times with Jimmy Carter.

Bush’s China policy, and in a sense the whole of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century, is based on a single article of faith: that if market economics are introduced, political freedoms will inevitably follow. China is the best proof of what naive folly this can be.

The society that Deng is forging is a bizarre mutant. It is a society that manages to combine all the worst excesses of Western capitalism with a system of totalitarian control of the most bitter and comprehensive sort.

Many Chinese have flourished since Deng’s opening to the capitalist world. This is especially true in the south, where the Cantonese draw on a long mercantile tradition. The town of Shenzhen, which is designated as a special economic zone, bristles with new skyscrapers in imitation of Hong Kong, just across the border.

The Marlboro Man towers above the railway station in the nearby provincial capital of Guangzhou. Inside the grimy building, teen-age toughs run gangs of 8-year-old beggars and pickpockets, Oliver Twist-fashion, right under the noses of the Public Security Bureau, which is said to be deeply involved in corruption and smuggling in this frontier territory.

On the 36-hour train ride to Beijing, the tinny loudspeakers would once have blared out the old Maoist anthem, “The East is Red.” Now the barrage of electronic bleeps and squawks from innumerable hand-held video games, made in China, is what keeps the traveler awake in the hard-bed sleeper car.

All is evidence of capitalism at work. But what of the political freedoms that are supposed to follow, as night follows day? The picture is bleak. Take the recent affair of the T-shirts, which has stirred what some people half-jokingly call a second Cultural Revolution--albeit one with a distinctly postmodern tinge.

Western T-shirts proliferate, often with messages in fractured English. I caught sight of one with the image of four familiar green-shelled figures and the intriguing logo, “Teenage Muting Ninth Turrets.” With these the party has no trouble. Pop images of Mao Tse-tung himself, intended as a sardonic comment on the recent corruption of the Communist Party’s ideals, present the authorities with a slightly trickier problem.

But what recently drove the Beijing Communist Party into emergency session was a more oblique and insidious display of youthful disaffection. The messages on Wenhua shan, or cultural shirts, often convey boredom or alienation. One shirt that the party deemed guilty of “spiritual pollution” simply bore the words of ousted party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang to the students in Tian An Men Square two years ago, after he had lost the battle over the imposition of martial law: “I came too late. I’m too old. It doesn’t matter.”

The party even demands to silence dissent beyond the grave. One directive of the Deng era stipulates that the wills of prisoners executed for “counterrevolutionary” crimes should be suppressed if they contain any “reactionary statements.” Nor will their families be able to give ritual expression of their grief by holding a funeral, since this might “disturb the proper social order.”

The new China that Bush is helping Deng create is a place where Western businessmen can play a round of golf at the new Japanese-built country club in the valley of the tombs of the Ming emperors and then return to listen to a Chinese string quartet sawing away at Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” amid the gilded columns, pink marble and artificial waterfalls of Beijing’s palatial hotels.

It is also a place where any murmur of independent thought will bring years in a moldering prison cell. That is, if you have the good fortune to be an intellectual. For an ordinary worker, it is more likely to mean death in some remote field, with a bullet in the back of the neck, and not even a funeral to mark your passage.