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By DANNY SCHECHTER

China's President, Jiang Zemin, is coming to Washington Sunday for a summit with our president, Bill Clinton. And, assuredly, the friction between Washington and Beijing over human rights will continue to produce heat, especially with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's more morality-driven approach to foreign policy.

Just how fervent the United States is about human rights is, needless to say, debatable. After all, in July, before approving a foreign-aid bill, the Senate wouldn't even pass a nonbinding resolution criticizing China's civil rights performance.

And in my field, television, which so mirrors national cultures, both countries reflect either an outright rejection of regular coverage of human rights or a resistance to expanding them.

Earlier this year, I was invited to speak at a conference for TV producers in Beijing - a government-sponsored "International TV Week." An American foreign correspondent there told me that he encountered more hostility from the American business community in Beijing for his human rights reporting than from the Chinese government. Chinese officials made themselves available for comment more than U.S. executives. I responded that I had been told a few years back by the Public Broadcasting Service that human rights is "an insufficient organizing principle for a TV series," a sentiment I suggested might be shared by China's Politburo.

"Yes, here they would agree," he replied.

A point rarely acknowledged is that our TV system is no less controlled than China's - but in more subtle ways. There they have explicit censorship that many journalists work to get around. Here we have self-censorship and somewhat more rigid conventions about limiting program formats that can be more insidious, especially when not recognized. Here, increasingly, what's news is what titillates - especially on TV, where the merger between show business and the news business has taken effect.

Restraints are more obvious in China, where programing is run by the party faithful and guided by "The Three Nos" - no Tibet programs, no Tiananmen Square programs and the big one, no human rights commentary.

Dissent and debate are programa non grata. China argues that the United States backs rights not accepted by the entire international community - just "purely the rights of the West" (political rights, not economic and social rights).

China does have a point. Critics of its violations can all too often become selective or self-righteous ideologues, sweeping our own problems under the rug. Indiscriminate China bashing can be unfocused and unfair, not making a distinction between the people and government policy.

Officials at the television conference told me not to discuss human rights. It was verboten. Yet when I showed my film on Nelson Mandela's triumph in South Africa, the lessons about the need to combat oppression were obvious to many. At the same time, almost every Chinese person I spoke to seemed to believe that China must become stronger economically before it can introduce more democratic political reforms.

They point to the chaos in Russia as an example of what can happen when reforms are introduced too rapidly. They also note that 200 million Chinese remain illiterate. Economic development, they say, is their priority.

Yet I was impressed with the energy, talent and enthusiasm of many of the young people present who were certainly not robot-like party-liners, as they are often stereotyped. Drawing on my own experiences in American television, I expressed the hope that they can reinvent TV and not duplicate a system like ours that seems to be intent on dumbing down viewers.

I could identify with many of my colleagues' determination to push their envelopes and find space for honest reporting and better production values. Some had produced dramas on the level of Hollywood features. Others were doing documentaries and newsmagazine stories with lots of enthusiasm, creativity and craft. Like many here, they have learned how to pry open the system for some mildly critical voices.

One energetic report I saw chronicling recent village elections showed people rejecting the party's choice of candidates, and openly articulating grievances with the kind of gusto you find every day in New York.

Another exposed the troubles of an impoversished rural school teacher. Its broadcast had been delayed when editors worried that it wasn't positive enough, but it finally aired along with reports on the work of a police unit combating pervasive official corruption.

Throughout the conference, producers spoke almost exclusively in terms of serving the market, not the public good. Most of them were not concerned with the challenges of democratization. They are more interested in how to become successful in commercial terms.

With a wink and a nod, and in line with official ideology,"building socialism" now means building capitalism as the road to national prosperity. China's President Jiang made that priority clear at the 15th Party Congress last month, announcing his sayonara to socialism with a plan to shift the economy away from state ownership to a system of shareholding that threatens layoffs for millions of workers.

Thus it was not surprising to pick up a catalogue of the new programs Chinese TV stations are trying to sell and see them gravitating to safer subjects featuring recycled entertainment-oriented formulas and formats, cloning our junk TV. Rupert Murdoch, not Karl Marx, seems to be the guru. And they have no Marvin Kitman to keep them honest.

Here are descriptions of some of Bejing's hot new shows:

"Don't Say Good-bye," a 20-part series. "Young and pretty head nurse Yu Ming is gentle and kind-hearted. She and her boyfriend Zhong Chengzhi sustain losses in business. To pay his debts, he has to throw himself into the arms of the rich lady Lu Sisi . . . "

"City Patrol Cop" involves chases of "taxi criminals" and "Anti-Narcotics in the Capital" with "footage of smashing up of drug-users' dens, burning drugs and bringing drug criminals to trial."

And then there is "Woman Armed Police and Their Male Team Leader." China's "No. 1 overlord confronts a unit run by a well-known male team leader . . . Many stories take place between the male leader and the special armed policewoman."

Programing of this sort reflects the contradictions of a system my partner calls "Market Leninism." Conspicuously not on the list there - or for that matter here - are series about human rights.

© 1997, Newsday Inc.

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