NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S.-China Pact Was Won the Hard Way : Trade: Intellectual property rights agreement follows 20 months of high-risk negotiating by a tough team of two.

The landmark U.S.-China agreement on the protection of intellectual property to be formally signed this week in Beijing marks a success of U.S. brinkmanship, a bit of footwork learned the hard way.

As trade ambassador Mickey Kantor signs the documents, standing in the wings will be a pair of young diplomats whom many credit as being the true architects of the agreement aimed at curbing rampant piracy by the Chinese of U.S. copyrighted products, patents and trademarks.

Lee Sands, 44, a tall China scholar with a taste for Tang Dynasty verse, and Deborah Lehr, 30, his petite, stylish deputy who impressed the Chinese with her tenacity, spent 20 months in head-to-head talks with Beijing officials renowned for their to-the-brink negotiating skills.

Indeed, if Beijing comes to the table at all, China hands say, its negotiators are notorious for pushing deadlines to the last minute, settling as late as possible to as little as possible and then taking their time following through.

The strategy often works. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Beijing to talk about human rights last year, Chinese authorities pointedly detained dissidents on the eve of his visit. The human rights improvements Washington had sought didn’t come--but rather than withdrawing Most Favored Nation trading privileges as threatened, Uncle Sam just blinked.

So in December, when negotiator Sands was trying to curb Chinese piracy of U.S. copyrighted goods, he abruptly cut off dead-ended talks a day early, skipped a top-level banquet and left Beijing, all in a risky gamble to beat Beijing at its own specialty--brinkmanship.

China responded with threats of a trade war and a rare, stinging personal attack on Sands.

“The bogeyman . . . was the U.S. lead negotiator Lee Sands,” a Beijing official was quoted as saying in the China Daily on Dec. 23. The official blamed Sands’ “arbitrary, freewheeling and meddling posture” for the breakdown of the talks.

But instead of loudly defending Sands--and escalating the confrontation--Washington stayed silent. Beijing later retracted the statement.

“That,” recalls Sands, “was the turning point.”

When the U.S. trade team returned in February, Beijing was ready to talk and, in the end, agreed to most of what the United States wanted.

The agreement Kantor is to formally sign this week provides market access and protection for U.S. copyrighted products. It puts U.S. and China on common, if perhaps still shaky, ground after last year’s bungled MFN negotiations and continuing friction between the nations over human rights and nuclear proliferation.

To be sure, Sands and Lehr went to the table with a stronger hand than their U.S. colleagues held in the human rights talks. The team of two had clear evidence of copyright abuses, well-defined ways to help China enforce its existing laws and the threat of painful trade sanctions if it didn’t. Support from the U.S. business community was virtually unanimous.

Undergirding the discussions was the understanding that a strict regime for protecting intellectual property would help China’s bid to enter the World Trade Organization--which Beijing badly wants to join this year.

By contrast, previous MFN negotiations, observers say, were doomed because China values political stability above all else and had little motivation to show leniency to dissidents.

So is the hard line on China the right line? It depends on what’s being argued.

“There are some things all the toughness in the world won’t change overnight,” says Burt Levin, a former U.S. ambassador to Korea and Taiwan who has seen respect for both individual freedoms and intellectual property rights develop as the countries’ economies do. “Anyone who takes the lesson (that) we should hit hard on human rights is barking up the wrong tree.”

Prof. William Alford, a legal scholar at Harvard, says that “a less confrontational posture has its advantages.” A country has limited leverage, he says, and “constant conflict wears ties thin.”

Sands, a China scholar before he joined the U.S. government in 1981, concentrated more on history than on game theory. But he has been able to put his study to unexpected good use. Tall and good-humored, he speaks and writes Chinese well enough to trade Tang Dynasty poems with the officials across the table.

His mission contrasted markedly with last year’s MFN negotiations, which had U.S. business leaders and human rights advocates sharply divided on whether to renew China’s privileged trade status in the face of its deteriorating human rights record.

The trade team also put up a united front this time. After many months of trans-Pacific flights and intense negotiating sessions, Sands and Lehr are able to recite each other’s arguments, even tell the other’s stories. Their conversation is a tag-team repartee, alternately serious, gibing and witty.

Sands and Lehr found that using informal channels to sound out possibilities can move matters more quickly than a formal face-off. “None of the important decisions on either side were made at the table--not one,” Sands says.

Rather, key advances were made over quick smoking breaks in the hallway outside the negotiating room, a space that came to be called “Lee’s Office.” If it weren’t for his cigarette habit, Sands jokes, the U.S. and China might be in the middle of a trade war right now.

But they’re not done yet. Critics such as Alford, director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard, predict U.S. officials will be back at the table sooner than they like.

“People are assuming that signing the document will immediately change China’s behavior. I think that faith is misplaced,” he says. “People don’t have conversions in their hearts at gunpoint.”

Says Sands, “In China, the negotiations never really end.”