PERSPECTIVE ON CHINA : Give Up Trying to Be Pygmalion : Both U.S. business and reformers need to reassess a nation unwilling and unable to fit our mold.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown may believe his trip to China has been a triumph in salesmanship that will net billions for American business. But it has surely left China’s dictators smiling with the secure feeling that they can make more deals with “business first” Americans, tighten the screws on dissidents at home with impunity and go on the offensive against any Americans who insist that they respect the rights of their own citizens.

Too many American views of China are colored by wishful thinking and greed. It is a result of a cultural habit of thinking; a combination of a missionary zeal to convert and a capitalist zeal to profit.

Many Americans like the notion that they can somehow pressure China to “be like us.” We can’t. As with so much, in dealing with China, there is a great gulf between being well-meaning and doing good.

The Chinese know perfectly well who they are. There is no groundswell among them to be democratic in the mold of America. Experience with democracy is something they have never had. They don’t know the taste of the rule of law, or fair play. Their system has not allowed that.

There is a groundswell among China’s citizens to demand accountability from their government. But their government is aloof to these demands. China’s Communist Party dictators form a thin class at the top of society. They are the lords, the feudal families who control most of the power and wealth. They also control most of the guns.

This ruling class is changing the currency of its power from private perks and privileges to money. They are cashing in. Some of their money goes into investments outside China, like homes in California, where they know it will be safe, and where they may someday flee. Much of the money is used to lubricate an internal system of corruption. No foreign investors will be immune from the siphoning effects of Chinese business. Some of the spoils of the new money game go to the branches of the vast security apparatus--from riot police to border police to customs agents to municipal police to secret police. These police are the agents of repression and torture. These people run drugs and guns and contraband and brothels. They work fist in glove with emerging criminal syndicates. So the hooligans at the bottom of society, the ex-cons and street-hustlers, flourish along with their patrons--the hard-core communists and their families.

Caught in the vise of greed and plunder and official caprice is the vast majority of China’s 1.2 billion people. Most are very poor and barely educated. They are accustomed to government repression and persecution, to struggling against their betters, to treachery and betrayal. They are also accustomed to working hard and using enterprise and perseverance to survive.

Many also are angry at being squeezed. So they rebel. They riot. They go on strike. They complain. They wait.

The most able turn to business. They make profits on the model of a Michael Milken. The best and the brightest run ahead of regulations and churn money through a system that is governed by insider trading.

But there is little room and little opportunity for most of China’s farmers and workers to prosper. So the least able remain busy and poor, or just idle. Often they lose their money when they stake it on pursuing new opportunities. Like many of the millions who ride the rails to the big coastal cities only to exhaust their savings and themselves in search of work, finding that too many others got there first. They return home broke, ashamed, dispirited to lives of poverty.

Then there are the industrial workers. The communist state remains, but its promise of cradle-to-grave benefits is withering away. Many of those who are laid off fend for themselves. They are angry that egalitarian dreams have been taken away. Some long for the guarantees of the Maoist days. The laid-off woman who invested in stock and lost her money feels she had been abandoned twice--once by the fading promises of socialism, again by flickering promise of the market. Those who have jobs often moonlight.

For all their problems, the Chinese remain proud and capable. They and their leaders will cobble together a new nationalism, which Westerners may not like. Across society, most Chinese are wary of what their propagandists dub “foreign hostile forces.” Despite any photo-ops and embraces between officials and their so-called “old friends” from abroad, official xenophobia remains a cornerstone of China’s internal governing ideology. The officials will protect their people from foreigners wishing to convert them. They also will protect them from plunder by foreigners.

China’s growth statistics may lull many Americans into imagining that the nation is on a happy trajectory to riches. But the opposite is true. As China deconstructs from social and economic tensions within, as its arable land shrinks and pollution mounts, as its population increases, the nation may plunge into harsher times. If natural disaster hits or, political infighting turns to armed conflict, the specter of Rwanda could be reflected in pockets of China.

Millions of Chinese are ready to leave in search of economic and political opportunities. So far, few get out.

Americans might best start to think about China less as a country ripe for profit-taking and political conversion and more as one on the verge of a hemorrhage.