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

DATE: TUESDAY, March 27, 1990                   TAG: 9003270128
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BUSH AND CHINA/ STICKING TO FECKLESS POLICY

He has no reason to be. Since the army's massacre of students and other protestors in Tiananmen Square last summer, Beijing has extended its crackdown on dissent throughout the country. The secret mission Bush sent to China last fall - which critics called kowtowing - pleased the hard-liners there but did not lead to an easing of repression.

Nor did it redeem the United States in the hard-liners' eyes. In a speech last week to China's parliaments, Premier Li Peng warned of a threat to the country from "foreign hostile forces," an apparent reference to the United States and some nations of Western Europe. Why have Sino-U.S. relations deteriorated in the past year? It's America's fault, the result of sanctions voted by Congress in the wake of Tiananmen, and other "hegemonistic" efforts to meddle in China's business.

"We must intensify dictatorship by the socialist-state apparatus," proclaimed Li, and judicial departments should "be on the alert to crush infiltration and subversion attempted by foreign and overseas hostile forces." As for the crushing of the students' protests last summer, that was a victory for socialism.

Li also weighed in against the kind of Western-style political reforms sweeping Europe, but left the way conspicuously open for Western trade and technology. No matter how the rest of the world changes, he said, "China will never close its doors." Except to ideas about freedom and to hat-in-hand missions from other countries.

On the basis of 14 months as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing in the mid-1970s, George Bush stakes his claim to an expertise that, apparently, no one else shares. "I'm familiar with China," he told the March 13 news conference, "and I think we're on the right track. And I hope that we'll see an evolution of more reform." We all hope that. Hope seems the only thing to go on right now.