Bush Will Meet Chinese Premier : Diplomacy: His talk with Li on Friday will boost Beijing’s respectability, damaged by 1989 massacre. But the U.S. seeks to play down the meeting.

The White House announced Wednesday that President Bush will meet with China’s Premier Li Peng in New York City on Friday, an action that will give the Chinese regime its most significant boost toward regaining the international respectability it lost after the Beijing massacre of pro-democracy dissidents in 1989.

Li, who played an active and prominent role in calling Chinese troops into Beijing to clear the demonstrators out of Tian An Men Square, is making his first trip to the West since those events nearly three years ago.

Both he and Bush will be at the United Nations on Friday for a 15-nation summit session that will be attended by all members of the Security Council. U.S. officials confirmed that the President has agreed to Chinese requests for a separate, face-to-face session with the Chinese premier after the Security Council session has ended.

The Administration appeared to be going out of its way to attract as little publicity as possible to the event. Bush’s meeting with Li was announced late in the day Wednesday, at a time when it would be less likely to attract attention from the White House press corps.

While Bush’s bilateral sessions with other leaders will take place at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where the President is staying, the session with Li will be at the United Nations--a neutral setting where Bush will not be a host welcoming a guest.

Chinese students living in the United States already have organized demonstrations against Li’s appearance at the United Nations. And the White House announcement of Bush’s separate meeting with Li touched off immediate protests by critics of Bush’s China policy, including some members of Congress.

In a joint letter to the President, 22 senators complained that “it would be inconsistent with U.S. policy for such a meeting to take place while the harsh post-Tian An Men crackdown ordered by Mr. Li continues unabated, and thousands of pro-democracy activists remain imprisoned.”

Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of the private American human rights group Asia Watch, said that the Bush Administration’s approach to meeting with Li contrasts with that of the Ronald Reagan Administration when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to Washington for a summit meeting in 1987.

On that occasion, he noted, the White House took care to demonstrate U.S. concern for human rights issues by having President Reagan meet with Soviet dissidents in the White House while Gorbachev was in this country.

“In the case of China, the Administration has consistently played down human rights, relaxed sanctions against China and fought off the attachment of human-rights conditions on renewal of China’s most-favored-nation status,” he said.

Bush’s willingness to meet with Li represents a remarkable recovery both for the Chinese government and for Li personally. Until last year, the world’s leading industrial nations were carrying out what amounted to an undeclared boycott on meetings with the Chinese premier.

The ice was broken last summer when Toshiki Kaifu, then the Japanese prime minister, and British Prime Minister John Major sat down with Li. Both men did so during trips to Beijing, rather than in their own countries.

“Li is desperately attempting to avoid being made the fall guy for 1989,” Roderick MacFarquhar, director of Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, observed recently. He said that during the 1989 crackdown, Li was only “the front man” for more senior figures such as China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and President Yang Shangkun.

However, those foreigners who have talked with senior Chinese officials since 1989 say that, while others leaders such as Yang seem amiable and conciliatory, Li goes out of his way to defend the Tian An Men Square crackdown and to challenge Western beliefs about human rights.

When Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with him in Beijing two months ago, Li warned that American efforts to press for human rights in China amounted to interference in the country’s internal affairs.

Noting that China had suffered from foreign aggression for more than a century before the Communist takeover in 1949, Li told Baker: “We highly cherish our independence and sovereignty.”

U.S. officials have argued that because China is a big and powerful country with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, it is important to maintain a dialogue with its leadership.