U.S. should be firm with China

China's prime minister, Li Peng, was in Moscow last week, urging that Russia and China stand together against alleged American bullying. Twenty-five years after Richard Nixon courted China to help contain the Soviet Union, China is playing its own version of triangular diplomacy to exert leverage on the United States.

The gambit was further evidence that relations between Washington and Beijing, once the pride of American diplomacy, are profoundly troubled. It will take a combination of patience and firmness by President Clinton to stabilize the relationship without sacrificing U.S. interests.

The United States has a clear interest in maintaining good relations with Beijing. China is a nuclear power, one of the world's fastest growing economies, and home to one-fifth of the world's population.

U.S. companies have invested more than $7 billion in China since 1979 and export about $9 billion worth of goods to the country annually. The United States also imports nearly $40 billion worth of Chinese goods, making China America's sixth- largest trading partner.

But managing relations has not been easy. Both Clinton and President Bush have worked to accommodate Chinese sensitivities. Instead of responding with greater cooperation, Chinese leaders have become more truculent. Political maneuvering to determine the post Deng Xiaoping political landscape seems to be driving all factions toward ideological rigidity and prickly nationalism.

Sino-American relations have deteriorated since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Ties have suffered further in recent weeks after Washington -- correctly -- let Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, attend a reunion at Cornell, his alma mater. China has withdrawn its ambassador from Washington and withheld approval for America's proposed next envoy to Beijing, Jim Sasser, the former Tennessee senator. In addition, it has conspicuously courted Iran and Iraq.

U.S. interests with China had taken a more positive direction after Nixon opened links to Beijing as a cold-war counterweight to Moscow. Today, Washington must try to constrain nuclear proliferation and regional conflict, protect U.S. access to one of the world's largest and most dynamic markets and encourage more humane treatment of Chinese citizens, including dissenters and national and ethnic minorities.

For years, China has violated its own pledges and international agreements on matters ranging from weapons transfers to prison labor and generally gotten away with it. Washington was content to see China concentrate on economic reform. But the economic renaissance has masked political repression and growing international belligerence which the United States must protest more vigorously. Beijing recently sent warships to back its claims in the potentially oil-rich Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, more than 500 miles from China's coast.

Egregious affronts to human rights, such as the recent reimprisonment of pro-democracy intellectual Chen Ziming and the denial of consular access to a detained U.S. citizen Harry Wu, should be met by America with denial of cabinet-level visits and any planned meeting between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

When Secretary of State Warren Christopher meets China's foreign minister at the annual Southeast Asian foreign ministers' conference later this month, he should be blunt about the dangers posed to regional peace by China's show of force in the Spratly Islands.

Washington need not respond in kind to every Chinese diplomatic provocation. But excessive concern about Chinese sensitivity can lead to policy paralysis. The transition ahead in Beijing will be bumpy, so there is all the more reason for Washington's handling of China to be clear and consistent.

-- The New York Times