NEWS ANALYSIS : End to Trade Dispute Unlikely to Cement U.S.-China Ties : Diplomacy: Relations will be strained by conflicts--over ideals, for example--that tariffs issue postponed.

President Clinton chose to back away from a human rights confrontation with China to avoid a damaging rift with one of the world’s great economic and military powers. But what is likely to ensue now, many experts in and out of government acknowledge, is far from a period of tranquil relations.

In fact, now that the dispute over China’s most-favored-nation trading status is finally being resolved, a number of other conflicts are likely to boil to the surface. Many of these have been suppressed or delayed by the Clinton Administration’s preoccupation with the trade dispute.

It may well turn out, some say, that the trade issue was not really the problem between the United States and China but merely a symbol of broader underlying problems--that is, conflicts over ideals, over economics and over the future geopolitical map of Asia.

In other words, relations between the United States and China are shaky enough that all the efforts expended on the trade dispute may produce only very fragile, short-term gains.

“Even if the President were to say, ‘I’m giving MFN to China for five years,’ it’s Pollyannish to think everything else will be taken care of,” one U.S. official observed recently.

“We will stop focusing on one debate and start focusing on others,” the official said. “It’s just going to go on. There are still a lot of other issues that need to be worked out, and they’re not even going to be addressed until MFN gets out of the headlines.”

Over the next few months, the Clinton Administration is likely to challenge China by moving ahead with other trade sanctions that it has threatened as retaliation for China’s pirating of U.S. tapes, compact discs, movies and computer software.

Over the next year or two, the United States and China are also expected to clash over China’s continuing nuclear tests, which are likely to resume soon.

In addition, the United States could well find itself complaining again about China’s arms exports. And China will haggle with the United States over the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the terms for its membership in the new World Trade Organization, the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

That list of disputes does not even include other, possibly more contentious controversies, such as those over North Korea’s nuclear program and the future of Cambodia, still torn by civil war despite a 1991 peace treaty.

Once the trade and human rights linkage is behind them, however, Clinton Administration officials are likely to try hard to upgrade ties with Beijing.

“My guess is that after MFN, they are going to go into a full-court press to improve relations with China,” said former U.S. Ambassador to China James R. Lilley. “They’re going to move fast and hard. We’ve got important interests in North Korea and Cambodia, and we could use China’s help.”

As part of that effort, Washington sources said, the Administration is expected to announce the appointment of a new envoy to China soon. The likely candidate is a veteran China specialist: Charles W. Freeman Jr., now assistant defense secretary, who served during the early 1980s as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

There are some precedents that may give U.S. officials hope that the Administration will succeed in upgrading ties with Beijing--although they are not necessarily comparisons the Administration would advertise.

Before Clinton, one other President had come to the White House promising a tougher U.S. policy toward China after a campaign in which he accused his predecessor of being too weak and too conciliatory to the Beijing regime.

That President was Ronald Reagan, who complained in the 1980 campaign that the Jimmy Carter Administration had gone too far in abandoning Taiwan when it established diplomatic ties with China. Reagan suggested that as President he would give greater support to Taiwan.

And, just like Clinton, Reagan was greeted with about 18 months of the silent treatment from China. Finally, in August, 1982, he negotiated a deal with Beijing. That deal--a communique in which the United States promised to limit arms sales to Taiwan--opened the way to more than six years of generally harmonious ties between Washington and Beijing. All other disputes suddenly became relatively easy to solve.

But that was during the Cold War, when the United States and China shared the same fundamental strategic objective of trying to counteract the military power of the Soviet Union.

The Clinton Administration does not have the glue of the Cold War to bring the United States and China back together again. And some U.S. China experts point to other, much more recent trends that suggest that separating the trade and human rights issues may not ease frictions between Washington and Beijing for long.

Only a year ago, with much less fanfare than last week, Clinton “de-linked” the issues of arms proliferation and China’s trade benefits.

Before Clinton took office, President George Bush had repeatedly vetoed legislation that would have required China, before winning a renewal of its trade privileges, to make progress not only on human rights but also on curbing its arms exports and reducing its trade imbalance with the United States.

Clinton enshrined the linkage between most-favored trade benefits and human rights in an executive order a year ago. But at the same time, he dropped the conditions on arms exports and the trade imbalance, saying that these problems could be dealt with through other means.

So what happened? The Administration felt obliged to prove that, even without most-favored trade linkage, it could take tough action against the proliferation of weapons and missiles. Last August, as punishment for China’s sale of missile technology to Pakistan, the United States imposed sanctions barring the sale of U.S.-made satellites to China.

“They (Administration officials) de-linked trade and arms control last year, but the result afterward was a downward trend in the relationship,” one U.S. official said. “And I’m afraid that, to prove that they still care about human rights, they’ll do things now on human rights that will ring off even more bells in Beijing than MFN linkage, such as actions to upgrade ties with Taiwan and Tibet.”

Indeed, in the first 24 hours after Clinton announced that China’s trade benefits would be renewed, top Administration officials began to suggest that the President might take other actions on human rights that could produce new frictions between Washington and Beijing.

“I think that, in the future, we’ll be keeping steady pressure on, through other instruments, in a way that may cause (Chinese officials) to make more progress in the future,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said. “We’re certainly not giving up on improvement in human rights in China.”