HOW YOU CAN JUDGE JIANG'S VISIT

By Johanna McGeary

China can't get no respect. The world's most populous country, the up-and-coming superpower, the economic behemoth--none of that cuts much ice in American minds preoccupied with Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Taiwan, not to mention the Communist Party. That's precisely why China's President Jiang Zemin is so eager to come here. He may have consolidated power internally, but he desperately wants to affirm his nation's legitimacy abroad. So Jiang's aim during his eight-day state visit, the first since China's bloody suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, is nothing less than to change the minds of Americans about what is going on in China and why they should care about it.

Bill Clinton sometimes has trouble getting respect too. He wants history to remember him as a great strategic thinker, so he needs to set U.S.-China relations, the most perilous on the globe, on the right track for the next century. Up to now he hasn't defined the terms of that connection very well, Republicans and many Democrats have formed a China-bashing alliance, and groups with a host of complaints about issues from human rights to trade browbeat the Administration to treat China as a pariah. Like Jiang, Clinton has to persuade his countrymen that the People's Republic is less communist than they fear and more benign than they think if he is to pursue an effective policy of engagement. As Clinton said in a speech last week, "For good or ill," China will shape our future.

It's a neat congruence of goals. Trouble is, what each side needs to claim a success is contrary to the other's interests. As the visit proceeds, here's what you should know about what's really happening.

ATMOSPHERICS. Far more than those old get-togethers with the Soviets, this is a summit about perceptions, where the meeting itself is the message. The Chinese are already packaging it as the second normalization of Sino-American relations. To confirm that, Jiang wants to be accorded status and respect, the treatment due the leader of a great nation, signifying not only the end of the opprobrium China has endured since Tiananmen Square but also its emergence as the 21st century's other great power. So Jiang's handlers have been acutely concerned to ensure that his trip conforms exactly to the rules laid down by the last state visit of Deng Xiaoping in 1979, right down to the size of the state dinner.

What Jiang's ringmasters have missed is that Deng's transforming moment was spontaneous, when he clapped a ten-gallon hat on his head in Texas and instantly conjured up the softer side of a regime the U.S. considered brutal, deceitful and threatening. Americans tend to judge countries in very human terms, so Jiang is going to have to find his own way to charm them into friendlier attitudes.

It's easy for Clinton to lay on the red-carpet welcome, the 21-gun salute, the Oval Office pageantry in Washington. The problem is the rest of the country, where Jiang is sure to face protesters, hecklers and tough questions from pesky reporters. At a Capitol Hill breakfast, half the Congressmen attending will be critics of China. Political demonstrators are going to dog his every step. China's officials say Jiang is visiting such hallowed points as colonial Williamsburg, Revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia's Liberty Bell to show his "deep democratic impulse"; Clinton's aides say these stopovers lend themselves to friendly lectures on what China needs to do to measure up; critics denounce it all as crass exploitation. How Jiang handles himself through these indignities will limn the image he leaves behind.

DELIVERABLES. To claim his own success, Clinton needs what U.S. officials call deliverables: specific commitments from Beijing that will prove the strategy of engagement is paying off. While Washington wants results on human rights, trade and nuclear nonproliferation, China wants concessions on Taiwan, permanent most-favored-nation status, and admission to the World Trade Organization. It's going to be tough to satisfy either side.

Human rights is the big-ticket item for Clinton, and the Administration has repeatedly said the relationship cannot reach its "full potential" as long as abuses persist. A high-profile gesture from Jiang would help: the release of well-known dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, some sign of religious freedom, a credible retreat on prison labor. But berating Beijing on human rights only injures its sense of sovereignty and challenges the regime's legitimacy. Jiang has given little indication that he is willing to do any of those things for the summit's sake, and China experts say he is especially loath to be seen on foreign soil giving in to U.S. pressure. Nor does he want to be upstaged in the press by any freed dissidents.

Domestic politics makes it equally imperative for Clinton to be seen standing up for moral positions. He will court political damage if he doesn't speak forcefully on human rights; still, he can't place the whole relationship in thrall to this issue. Rather than dwelling futilely on token releases, Clinton might shift the emphasis to an ongoing "human-rights dialogue" to open up legal processes and prisoner visits. Realistically, says a top Clinton adviser, "with the Chinese, human rights aren't a matter of negotiation. We have to be aggressive in pursuing them but recognize that they're going to do what they're going to do."

Next best would be an ironclad guarantee that Beijing will stop selling nuclear-weapons technology to Iran and Pakistan. That would unlock the sale of peaceful nuclear technology, guidance systems and high-speed computers that China covets for economic development. But Beijing has a history of ignoring the spirit, if not the letter, of its commitments, and Clinton has demanded unequivocal, airtight assurances before he does a deal. Officials seem hopeful, though, that this could be the summit's chief tangible accomplishment.

Other than that, Washington anticipates something of a deliverables deficit. China should too. "What we're giving is a state visit," says a senior official. "They're very, very gratified by that." What the U.S. is getting, he adds, may not be much. Everything else is marginal no matter how much summiteers try to gussy it up. Beijing has already dispatched a big-spending purchasing mission to the U.S. in hopes of obscuring the $40-odd billion U.S. trade deficit that threatens to corrode the whole relationship. That won't offset Beijing's weak efforts to open its markets or lure Congress into granting permanent most-favored-nation status. China can also forget about U.S. help in joining the World Trade Organization for now. Both nations are prisoners of their history and their domestic constituents on Taiwan, so neither will budge much on this.

Summits by their nature raise expectations of dramatic results and by that standard, this one could fall short. But if the crux of the issue is "Should he be here?", the lasting impact may simply be saying yes by regularizing top-level contact between the next century's dominant powers. While both countries will continue to disagree on a host of particulars, the U.S. and China are now purposefully engaged in peacefully defining a complicated relationship--the what and the how of it, not the whether.

--Reported by Dean Fischer and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON, JAIME A. FLORCRUZ AND MIA TURNER/BEIJING