Baker Plans to Get Right Down to Business in Beijing : Diplomacy: He’ll forgo the usual toasts and banquets. This reflects Administration sensitivity to possible political repercussions at home.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III will not take part in the sort of banquets and public toasts to Chinese leaders that touched off a furor in America when National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft visited Beijing two years ago, U.S. officials indicated Wednesday.

“There’s no banquet,” said a senior State Department in discussing Baker’s upcoming trip to Beijing, where the secretary of state will be the most senior U.S. official to visit since China’s 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations at Tian An Men Square. The plans underscore Baker’s apparent desire to set an unusually cool, business-like tone for his two-day visit.

Instead, after his arrival Friday, Baker will confine himself to a private, “working dinner” with Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. And, in the first disclosure of the plans for Baker’s visit, State Department officials said Baker will meet with top Chinese leaders, including Premier Li Peng and Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin.

The absence of a welcoming banquet will mark a considerable change from the way Sino-U.S. relations have usually been conducted. Senior American officials who have visited Beijing over the last 20 years generally have been greeted at public banquets, at which U.S. and Chinese leaders offer toasts to one another and to continuing friendship between the two countries.

The plans also demonstrate the sensitivity by the Bush Administration to the possible political implications at home of Baker’s visit to China.

In December, 1989, six months after the massacre that killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, the Administration dispatched Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to Beijing. This mission was directed at bringing what Scowcroft called “new impetus and vigor” to U.S.-China relations.

The two American officials were photographed clinking glasses and offering toasts to Chinese leaders at a banquet sponsored by the foreign minister. In his toast, Scowcroft said he and Eagleburger had come “as friends” and declared: “It is important that we not exhaust ourselves in placing blame for problems that exist (between the United States and China).”

The seeming warmth and intimacy of the toasts touched off a wave of angry denunciations in Washington. “It’s another example of the President’s tendency to kowtow to Beijing, in spite of the failure on the part of the government to relax the repression,” Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, said at the time.

Although the Scowcroft mission was aimed at restoring relations between the United States and China, the negative reaction it produced in Congress instead had the opposite effect. Ties between the two countries have become increasingly frosty in the two years since.

As Baker prepares for his Beijing trip, Congress is moving forward with legislation that would impose tough new conditions on the renewal of China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits, which allow China to export its goods to the United States at the same low tariff rates enjoyed by other countries.

A senior State Department official said Wednesday that Baker’s meetings with Chinese leaders will focus on the three main issues dividing the two countries: human rights, arms proliferation and trade.

Besides seeing the Chinese officials, a State Department official said Baker is expected to meet with one other unidentified Chinese leader. The most likely candidate would be President Yang Shangkun, the military leader who has played an increasingly powerful role within the Chinese regime over the last two years.

Both Yang and Li are believed to have played major parts, along with China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, in the decision to order the People’s Liberation Army’s assault on demonstrators in Tian An Men Square two years ago.

U.S. officials said that Baker may also hold a press conference in Beijing, either on his own or together with the Chinese foreign minister.

As part of the buildup for Baker’s visit, China arranged to have former secretaries of state Alexander M. Haig and George P. Shultz visit Beijing over the last few days--thus, in effect, delivering the message that Baker’s approach to China may be out of sync with the policies of his two immediate predecessors. “It is particularly happy for old friends to meet again,” Jiang was quoted as telling Shultz.

Baker and his staff were apparently unmoved. A senior State Department official discounted the significance of these visits by pointedly reminding reporters that Shultz was in China not only as a former secretary of state but also “as a businessman representing, I believe, the Bechtel Corp.” And the official noted that this was not the first time Haig has visited Beijing since the 1989 massacre.

On Oct. 1, 1989, Haig was the only American to take part in a Chinese National Day celebration at Tian An Men Square at a time when Western ambassadors in Beijing were boycotting the event. “I didn’t think he (Haig) struck a blow for freedom that night,” James Lilley, then U.S. ambassador to China, recalled recently.

Asked how Baker felt about his predecessors’ visits to China on the eve of his own trip there, a senior State Department official replied: “I think the secretary welcomes any travel that any former secretary of state is going to do. After all, he (Baker) will be a former secretary of state some day.”