NEWS ANALYSIS : Political Infighting in Beijing May Worsen Sino-U.S. Relations : Diplomacy: Recent incidents could be efforts by hard-liners to undermine moderates as Bush decides whether to renew China’s trade privileges.

When senior Bush Administration officials sought to restore good relations with China after the Tian An Men massacre in 1989, they discovered that hard-line elements in the Beijing leadership were trying to undermine their efforts.

Now it appears that these forces are trying once again to exacerbate tension between Washington and Beijing. In the process, they are providing a glimpse of some of the turbulence that may be in store for the United States as China’s leadership engages in a new round of political infighting and power struggles.

Over the weekend, Chinese security officials searched the offices of the Washington Post’s Beijing correspondent, Lena Sun, ransacking her files and seizing notebooks and papers. On Monday, the Bush Administration lodged a protest with China, and State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler told reporters that “we’ve obviously said we deplore this type of thing.”

The search came a month after the Chinese government’s refusal to allow two prominent U.S. senators to visit China and Tibet. It followed by only a few days the reported beating in Beijing of Han Dongfang, a Chinese dissident who Secretary of State James A. Baker III had been led to believe last November would be permitted to leave the country soon.

And, most significantly, Sunday’s raid by Chinese security officials occurred less than three weeks before the June 4 deadline by which President Bush is legally obliged to tell Congress of his decision on whether to renew China’s trade privileges in this country for next year.

“You have to wonder about the timing of all this,” said China specialist Harry Harding of the Brookings Institution. “It’s just speculation, but it seems that someone in China has an interest in making trouble.”

To outsiders, it might look foolish and counterproductive for China to harass American reporters and insult U.S. senators--particularly at a time when doing so could jeopardize its lucrative trade benefits. But some American specialists on China believe there are forces in Beijing that might welcome some new dispute with the United States.

“That’s why this (search) happened now,” one American China analyst said. “I assume this has got to do with internal politicking and with hard-liners in China trying to embarrass reformers.”

Donald Anderson, a former American diplomat who is the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said the timing of China’s recent action raises an “ominous” question: “Is there a faction in Beijing that would like to screw up relations with the West?”

China’s top leaders are getting ever more frail. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, now 87, was last seen on Chinese television early this year, exhorting the nation to pursue economic reforms, but walking only with the help of his daughter. Chen Yun--the conservative party elder who is the most powerful critic of the pace and scope of Deng’s economic reforms--is 86 and in worse health.

Next fall, the Chinese Communist Party is scheduled to hold a crucial party congress, its first in five years and the first since the political upheavals that produced the crushing of Beijing’s pro-democracy demonstrators in June, 1989. The congress has the power to select new leaders, including a Central Committee that will oversee the party for another five years.

After Deng’s rare public appearance earlier this year, Chinese reformers have seemed to be gaining ground over hard-liners within the leadership.

But U.S. analysts say the search of Sun’s office is one of a number of recent incidents showing that the political maneuvering in China--which amounts to a struggle over who will hold power after Deng’s death--is especially intense now and will continue at least until the party congress.

China’s nationwide security apparatus is under the control of a top party official named Qiao Shi, who has some links to reform elements within the Communist Party. One Bush Administration official noted Monday that, recently, “there has been an ongoing campaign by Qiao Shi to control the outflow of state secrets.” A search of a foreign correspondent’s files could conceivably be part of this campaign, he said.

But this U.S. official and several others said it is also possible that Beijing security officials carried out the search as part of an effort to embarrass Qiao or top reformers within the leadership. The Communist Party committee for the city of Beijing is controlled by some of the same hard-line officials who spearheaded the 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations.

U.S. officials point to other indications that some Chinese leaders are willing--or indeed eager--to create new frictions with Washington.

When Beijing recently refused to let Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) visit China, it irritated two members of Congress who could prove important in maintaining China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits.

Yet a Bush Administration official said this week that there was some evidence that China’s Premier Li Peng had been personally involved in the decision to reject the two senators. Li is among the Chinese leaders who have resisted most strongly any dismantling of China’s central-planning apparatus and its socialist state enterprises.

Harding observed Monday that “there might be people in China who believe that they would benefit from a loss of China’s trade benefits--because that would serve as justification for a reimposition of stronger state controls over the economy.”