If China Hints at Progress, Skepticism Is Warranted : China would like to stave off a formal United Nations condemnation of its human-rights practices.

The funeral ceremonies for Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping are over, so what will his chosen successor, President Jiang Zemin, do now? And how should President Clinton handle Jiang’s opening gambits?

At the moment, Jiang is struggling with what the Chinese indelicately call si ren zheng zhi--”dead man politics.” He is trying to overcome the legacy of recent Chinese history: that the deaths of Chinese leaders have, over the past decades, often led to political upheaval.

That is why the funeral ceremonies for Deng were so carefully controlled. Jiang, as stiff and angular as a pane of glass wearing spectacles, gave a warm, correct eulogy for Deng. But on television he also looked as if he were thinking, “Let’s hurry up and get back to business.”

The hunch here is that Jiang will, over the coming weeks or months, make some sort of modest gesture toward the United States. He may retreat a bit from China’s intransigent human-rights policies of the last few years. Or he may make some conciliatory move in another area, like weapons proliferation.

Jiang has some good foreign-policy reasons for doing so. China would like to stave off a formal United Nations condemnation of its human-rights practices; that issue may come to a vote at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in April. Mending fences with the United States would show Jiang’s leadership ability. And it might conceivably be good politics at home, too.

There is speculation, for example, that China may be preparing to release a few dissidents, or that it may offer to talk about letting the International Committee of the Red Cross into its prisons. But administration officials said this week that for now, there is no sign of any change in China’s policies. “It’s the same old story,” one U.S. official said.

If Jiang does make such a move, however, Clinton and his new foreign policy team will confront some hard decisions. They are going to have to figure out how to evaluate any peace offering from Jiang. Should they seize upon it as a sign of dramatic change and use it to declare victory for their China policy?

Let’s hope Clinton shows restraint. It would be worthwhile to keep two episodes from China’s recent history in mind. The first occurred on Clinton’s own watch in the White House. The other took place during the earliest stages of Deng Xiaoping’s rule.

In the fall of 1993, just as Jiang was preparing to meet Clinton for the first time during a summit meeting of Asian leaders, China made a startling announcement: It was willing to talk about letting the Red Cross into its jails.

That would have been a significant step for China, whose extensive prison system has long been off-limits to outsiders. The news made the front pages of American papers.

The problem is that it never happened. After the 1993 summit, China balked at following through. The Red Cross conducted endless negotiations with China, but they went nowhere. Instead, China has moved backward on human rights to the point where the State Department concluded that in 1996, “all public dissent against the party and government was effectively silenced.”

Oddly enough, the last four years of Chinese truculence leave Jiang in good shape to negotiate. He can take steps to ease repression in ways that will win him praise around the world. And yet, it is possible he will be merely returning the situation in China to where it was four years ago.

If China starts talking about opening its prisons to the Red Cross, that would simply bring things back to where they were in 1993.

Or let’s suppose Jiang takes the much more dramatic step of releasing Wei Jingsheng, China’s most prominent proponent of democracy. That would seem improbable, vastly out of character with the way the Chinese regime has behaved for the last four years. Yet even Wei’s release would bring things back only to where they were in 1993, when Wei was set free while China was trying to win support to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing.

In other words, as the Clinton administration deals with China under Jiang, it’s a classic case of having been down so long that everything begins to look like up. Whatever changes may be forthcoming from China should be kept in perspective.

The other episode worth remembering dates back nearly two decades. In late 1978, just as Deng was working to gain control over the Chinese Communist Party, he sent out signals that he supported China’s fledgling democracy movement.

At the time, the Beijing streets were full of young Chinese talking about the need for change; they put up wall posters calling for democratic political institutions and the creation of a modern legal system. Deng told foreign visitors the wall posters were “a good thing.” The crowds in the street cheered.

Wei Jingsheng happened to be one of those young Chinese activists. A British diplomat asked Wei why he didn’t believe that leaders like Deng wanted more freedom in China. “Because they have been Communists all their lives,” Wei replied. His instincts were right. Over the next two years, Deng reversed course, eradicating the protest movement and jailing its leaders.

The lesson is clear. It is conceivable that, with the death of Deng, some small hints of political change may be coming soon in China. We need to be prepared to ask ourselves how far these changes go, and whether they will prove to be merely evanescent.

In the past, too many have been fooled too often into believing Chinese leaders’ talk about a political opening. Let’s watch Jiang and his colleagues with both skepticism and a sense of history.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every other Wednesday.