
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990                   TAG: 9005290207
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EASY ON CHINA

IT COMES as no surprise that President Bush renewed most-favored-nation trading status for China. For the past year - since the Tiananmen Square massacre - he has been oddly disinclined to do anything that might offend Beijing. But his effort Thursday to explain his MFN decision served only to emphasize the contradictions between the special way his administration treats China and the way it looks on the rest of the world.

While renewing MFN status for China, Bush said it would be premature to grant the same status to the Soviet Union. Why? The political climate in America, he said, would make it "extraordinarily difficult" to do Moscow that favor while the Baltic republics are seeking concessions from the Soviets.

This president puts great store by polls, but it is not public opinion that tells him he can stroke China while holding the U.S.S.R. at bay. No surveys are necessary for any president to know that Americans are horrified by a regime that slaughters its own citizens while they demonstrate peacefully for democracy. Bush seems to base his policy on the notion that - because he spent 14 months as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing in the mid-1970s - he has a special knowledge of China and a rapport with its leaders.

Even grant him that, and it still sounds strange for him to refuse status to the Soviets because they have not enacted liberalized emigration laws, while China "does have the proper policy."

Laws are not the same as practice. For all its resistance to Baltic independence, this Moscow government has not mowed down any Lithuanians, Estonians or Latvians with machine guns. And what does China's "proper policy" have to do with that regime's continued repression of dissidents at home, or with its stepped-up harassment of Chinese students living in America?

Bush is closer to the truth when he says that revoking MFN status would hurt the Chinese people. It would also deal a body blow to Chinese exports to the United States, worth $12 billion last year, and perhaps bring on retaliation from Beijing. Some observers contend that loss of most-favored-nation standing would weaken those within China's power structure who still want economic and political reform. Perhaps, although those Chinese seem about as numerous as the legendary Iranian moderates of the mid-1980s.

Perhaps those who argue for punishing China by revoking MFN status lack an overwhelmingly persuasive case. But when the president tries to justify his own quirky policy with appeals to public opinion and comparisons with the Soviet Union, his arguments are considerably less than convincing.

by CNB