U.S. to Send Delegates to China Meeting : Congress: U.N. ambassador defends decision to attend conference on women. Gingrich, Dole oppose it.

Despite congressional calls for a boycott, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright vowed Wednesday that the Clinton Administration will send a delegation to China for a conference on women.

“It will convene in China in 33 days and, let there be no doubt, the United States will be there,” she said.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) both are supporting bills that would rescind funding for an American delegation at the conference.

But after listening to testimony from Albright, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of a House International Relations subcommittee, acknowledged that there is little chance for any legislation to pass before a congressional recess in mid-August.

The conference will begin before Congress returns for business in September.

“Obviously, you are going,” Smith said to Albright, adding that he hopes she will speak out against China’s abortion policies while she is in Beijing.

Albright, who has been chosen to head the delegation, used her own history to take a good deal of the bite out of Republican arguments that the United States will be turning a blind eye to Chinese human rights violations if American officials attend the conference. The argument has intensified because of China’s recent detention of Harry Wu, a Chinese American human rights activist.

Reminding the subcommittee that her father, a Czech diplomat, took refuge in the United States after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, Albright declared: “There is nothing more destructive to Communist governments than alternative ideas. They don’t know how to deal with them. It would be a big favor to the Chinese for us not to show up.”

Albright also said that the White House has not decided if First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the delegation’s honorary chair, will attend. It is widely assumed that she will not go to Beijing as long as the Chinese detain Wu.

But White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry told reporters that a decision about her attendance does not depend on the state of U.S.-Chinese relations.

Although the issue of human rights was Smith’s main focus as he tried to make the case for canceling American participation in the conference, two GOP subcommittee members raised the issue of what they said they see as an extreme feminist tone to the conference.

Rep. David Funderburk (R-N.C.) insisted that the conference “platform for action,” now in preparation, describes the world as made up of five genders: male, female, homosexual, bisexual and transsexual. Albright dismissed this.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), citing the alleged extremist views of conference organizers, remarked that Mrs. Clinton has her bags packed and is ready to go.

The comment provoked an angry defense of the First Lady by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame), who shouted that it was the previous, Republican Administration that acquiesced to the United Nations’ decision that the conference take place in China.

At a breakfast with members of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic group she once headed, Albright tried to reassure women planning to attend a non-governmental organization forum, meeting in conjunction with the Beijing conference, that the Administration is laboring to persuade the Chinese to speed the visa process.

More than 30,000 women are expected to take part in the forum, which will open before the 12-day conference begins Sept. 4. Although there have been reports from Beijing that the Chinese intend to grant only 5,000 visas for the forum, a U.S. official said the State Department has been assured by officials in China that they intend to process all 30,000 visa requests.