PERSPECTIVE ON CHINA : The West Has Lost Its Backbone : Beijing is getting away with behavior that from a less formidable nation would be subjected to scorn and sanctions.

Twenty-one years have now passed since Richard Nixon made his historic trip to China, to shake hands with the enfeebled Mao Tse-tung, to walk on the Great Wall (to declare with delphic economy that “this is a really great wall”), and to forge the beginnings of a sensible relationship with the world’s most populous nation. Not surprisingly, the relationship has long since come of age, and has even reached some kind of maturity. And yet at the moment it is looking oddly lopsided, as the events of the past week have so amply shown.

For the United States, all-powerful giant-killer and demon-slayer as it may well like to be regarded, seems these days to be quite unable or unwilling to stand up to China. A deference that borders on the obsequious seems to mark the Clinton Administration’s current dealings with Beijing--a surprising continuation of the fawning approach that was a characteristic of George Bush and his cheerleaders.

Beijing appears to be getting away with behavior that from a less formidable country would be the subject of America’s scorn, sanction or retaliation. Yet, for some complex cocktail of reasoning, which probably boils down to a deep-seated fear of a chain-reaction of consequences that Washington is unwilling to understand, calculate or even properly imagine, the United States invariably is the first, in every potential showdown over such matters, to blink.

President Clinton’s announcement Friday of an essentially unconditional renewal of China’s most-favored-nation status for another year is just one indication of Washington’s woolly thinking, its lack of bravura on matters Chinese. The trading status, with its formidable array of low entry-tariff privileges for Chinese goods, should have been revoked or severely modified long since on grounds of trade alone, given its $18-billion annual trade surplus with the United States.

But Clinton, taking his cue from scores of well-meaning advocates during the election campaign, saw to it that the trade issue became conjoined with China’s record on civil liberties and human rights. This was not a smart move. Not only did the linkage complicate and unfocus the original argument, it put the United States into the morally questionable (and at the same time rather naive) position of trying to buy China’s kindness with cash. Not, in the first place, an easy thing to achieve. And in the second, once that kind of bargaining was allowed to begin, it forced every matter of high principle to acquire a price of its own.

America bid; China put in counter bids. There was Beijing’s considerable and welcome order to the cash-strapped Boeing Co. There was a veiled but well-timed threat to the continuation of AT & T’s huge operations in China. There was bleating by Hong Kong’s British governor (who had been lunched frequently and well by the local American Chamber of Commerce) to the effect that big businesses in the colony would suffer grievous damage if MFN status was withdrawn. And, of course, there were always the United Nations cards to play: China’s support for the Gulf War, for the Bosnian policy--both needed, both tradable commodities as well.

The cogs of comparison started to spin. A few hundred political prisoners in China, or a few thousand unemployed aerospace workers in Seattle? Toll calls to and from Tianjin or tear gas in Tian An Men Square? An ever-rising Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong or a clutch of disappointed local liberal democrats, abandoned to their post-1997 fate? Support for policy in well-televised Bosnia or a little bit of ethnic cleansing in faraway Tibet? Given these kinds of calculation, and the political and economic realities that underpin them, small wonder that America has eventually blinked.

A bargain has now more or less been made that never had to be made. China, this year, has more or less got away with murder--quite probably literally--in part because its size and the strength of its economy offered that oh-so-tempting lure of more than 1 billion consumers. It is still a level of temptation before which the West’s big businesses will abandon any principle, and which helps them urge their political leaders to do just the same.

Now that MFN is done and won, it will be fascinating to see which way the West decides over the next item on the Chinese wish list: the millennial Olympics. Will the West agree to the Beijing’s claim? Or will it stand up to China and say no , as for quite different reasons America should have stood up and said no over trade. One has to doubt it. In the last 21 years China seems to have played an almost endless series of winning hands, and there seem to be very few outsiders--and in today’s new Washington in particular--who have the moral fiber or the political courage to do anything about it.

My guess is that MFN and the Olympics are China’s dual blessings for 1993, and given what is going on inside China still, our shame, all round.