COLUMN LEFT/ GEORGE BLACK : Bush Runs Into a Wall on China, Again : His Administration has gotten nothing for all its concessions.

Li Peng, the Chinese premier, came to New York on Friday, and exiled Chinese students greeted him by erecting replicas of a tank and the Tian An Men Square Goddess of Democracy. This time around, the statue crushed the tank.

Li Peng’s normal range of facial expressions covers the full spectrum from a scowl to a frown. But on this occasion he was no doubt encouraged by his PR advisers, Hill and Knowlton Inc., to force a smile, since the Senate is once again poised to take up the controversial matter of renewing China’s most-favored-nation trade status. Yet if the smile was pasted on at the start of the day, it was genuine by the end--for Li Peng knew that he could go home to Beijing with a briefcase full of photos of him shaking hands with George Bush.

The details of U.S. policy on China are controlled by the White House to such an extent that State Department officials joke that the President himself is their China desk officer. And when congressional critics of China try to attach conditions to the renewal of MFN--angered by Beijing’s huge trade surpluses with the United States, its occupation of Tibet, its sale of missiles to Syria and Iran, or its brutal human rights violations--they are either silenced by presidential veto or cowed by the assertion that George Bush possesses some special expertise on the subject.

This all goes back to the time that Bush spent as envoy to the U.S. liaison office in Beijing from September, 1974, to November, 1975. Under the tutelage of Henry Kissinger, he learned two lessons: that China was a vital strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union; and that diplomatic dealings with the Chinese, who could turn the cryptic phrase into an art form, was best left to a handful of initiates freed from the constraints of democratic debate.

Bush found himself in Beijing during dramatic times. In company with Kissinger, he paid a call on the dying Mao Tse-tung, who was barely able to speak coherently. Deng Xiaoping, restored to grace after his earlier humiliations in the Cultural Revolution, was locked in a power struggle with the ultra-radical Gang of Four. Bush pinned all his hopes on Deng as the leader who would bring much-needed stability to China. He prided himself on his personal rapport with Deng, and on his folksy, people-to-people approach to the Chinese. The Bushes’ cook, he informs us in his autobiography, called him “Busher, who ride the bicycle, just as the Chinese do.”

Since the 1989 Beijing massacre, Bush has shielded the Chinese government from the threat of sanctions. His argument for constructive engagement is that Deng’s economic reforms and trade with the West are steadily undermining communist authority, and that trade provides the framework of trust in which other issues of concern--such as human rights--can be discussed.

But as MFN renewal comes around again, what further reason is there to defer to the President? His “expertise,” such as it ever was, has long evaporated. The argument for cultivating China as an anti-Soviet ploy died with the Cold War; the vision of Deng as the agent of political reform and guarantor of stability was buried in Tian An Men Square, and Li Peng continues to brush off any questions about China’s human rights record as “internal interference.”

The behavior of the leadership in Beijing suggests that U.S. policy may actually have managed to produce the worst of both worlds. The stream of high-level contacts that culminated in the visit of Secretary of State James A. Baker III to Beijing last November seems to have persuaded the Chinese that they need fear no threat from this Administration. Baker did not just come away empty-handed; he was publicly humiliated by Deng’s refusal to meet him to receive a letter from Bush.

While benefiting handsomely from Bush’s indulgence, much of the present Chinese leadership has an ingrained suspicion of the Administration’s support for economic reforms, fearing that the end purpose of U.S. policy for the last 40 years has been China’s “peaceful evolution” toward capitalism. (The restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, of course, only lends credence to this view.) China is therefore vehemently opposed to any hint of a demand for concessions from a government that it might arguably see as its best ally.

Incredibly, George Bush gave the Chinese the ultimate plum: a face-to-face meeting in New York with Li Peng, the architect of the 1989 massacre and the most detested man in China. Li Peng’s unaccustomed smile is all that has been given in return to Busher, who sometimes rides his bicycle into a wall, just as the Chinese do.