China Threatens U.S. Over Taiwan Leader’s Visit : Diplomacy: Beijing recalls two delegations, vows further action over perceived nod to Taipei.

China threatened more retaliations Thursday and warned that the United States would “pay the price” if the Clinton Administration does not immediately withdraw permission for a U.S. visit in June by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang said Lee’s planned attendance at an alumni reunion at New York’s Cornell University is a breach of agreements between China and the United States, reached when the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1979. The agreements ban official relations between the United States and Taiwan.

Shen said two official Chinese delegations to the United States have already been called back and warned of more cancellations if the Administration does not quickly reverse its decision, announced on Monday under heavy pressure from both houses of Congress.

The next likely action from the Chinese, a senior Chinese official said privately, is cancellation of a summer visit by Gen. Chi Haotian, China’s minister of national defense.

His trip has been planned for months and is considered an important step in improving relations between the two militaries.

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Moreover, as Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s closest ally on the powerful Central Military Commission, Chi is viewed by many as key to building goodwill with a new leadership team under Jiang after the death of Deng Xiaoping, China’s ailing 90-year-old senior leader.

U.S. diplomats, struggling to persuade the Chinese that Lee’s visit marks no big shift in U.S. policy, would be relieved if Chinese retaliations were limited to the relatively minor diplomatic level of canceled visits.

“This is a very sensitive issue,” a Western diplomat said. “It would be surprising if there were not some kind of reaction.”

Chas Freeman, former assistant secretary of defense, said in a speech Thursday before the Asia Society in Hong Kong: “The Lee Teng-hui visit proves that if you spend enough money on Washington lobbyists you can accomplish wonders, but it does not speak well for the clarity, vision and strategic purpose of U.S. policy.”

There were already indications this week that the Lee visit could affect a broader range of U.S. interests in a period of rapidly deteriorating relations between China and the United States.

On Wednesday, the American Bar Assn. was informed that its long-planned conference in Beijing and Shanghai, coinciding with the Lee visit, had been canceled without warning by Chinese officials.

In a note to several hundred U.S. participants, the bar’s International Law and Practice Section blamed the sudden cancellation of the June 9-18 conference on “the current political situation in Beijing.” The conference was to have been co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice and the All-China Lawyers Assn.

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Shen, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, refused at a news briefing to specify what further retaliatory actions China was considering for what it views as betrayal by the United States over the Lee visit. Shen described the U.S. decision as tantamount to a recognition of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan.”

“What kind of measures China will take, it is not proper for me to discuss at this time,” Shen said. “But if the U.S. clings to its erroneous decision, some serious harm will be inflicted to Sino-U.S. relations.”

Meanwhile, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress issued a statement here saying the Lee visit “hurts the feelings of the 1.2 billion Chinese people.”

“We advise you not to go too far,” the statement warned the Administration and the U.S. Congress. “You may begin by damaging others but you will end up hurting yourselves.”

A major fear of the Chinese government is that the United States allowing Lee to visit will prompt similar “private” visits of senior Taiwanese officials to other countries, notably Japan and South Korea. But the focus of Beijing’s vitriol this week has been on the United States alone.

Shen said a Chinese envoy left Thursday for Taipei to make arrangements for meetings between representatives of the mainland and Taiwan later this summer.

For more than 16 years, the pillar of U.S.-China relations has been the “one China” policy, reflected in the Jan. 1, 1979, communique in which the United States recognized the “People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China.”

In the past two years, Taiwan has focused on a Lee visit to Cornell, where he obtained a post-graduate degree in agricultural economics, as a vital element in its strategy to win international recognition as an independent state.

The Administration’s refusal last year to allow Lee to deliver a Cornell speech caused a furor in Congress. Many members of Congress believe that he and Taiwan should be rewarded for Taiwan’s rapid transformation from a one-party dictatorship to almost a full-fledged democracy.

The contrast could not be greater with China, which this week rounded up dissidents who dared to speak out mildly before the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, army massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tian An Men Square.

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After initially opposing the Lee visit because it would be viewed internationally as a form of official recognition of Taiwan, U.S. diplomats are now forced to swallow their policy and persuade dubious Chinese counterparts that the trip is insignificant, “private” and has no international implications.

Their main hope is that Lee, on his visit, will not be lionized by the Republican Congress, which passed a resolution supporting his visit to Cornell by a unanimous vote.

If his June 8-14 visit lets Lee become the toast of Washington and gives him a U.S. media spotlight, diplomats fear it could be disastrous for years of carefully wrought relations with China.

The final Chinese reaction, one Western diplomat said, “rests on [U.S.] assurances about the way the visit will be handled.”