TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW TAIWAN

By Bruce W. Nelan

CHINA'S COMMUNIST LEADERS ARE having a bad dream. In it they see Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's assertive chief executive, being re-elected next month in the first direct presidential balloting in the history of China. They see Lee, flashing his broad grin, standing in the well of the U.S. House of Representatives, addressing a joint meeting of Congress. And they see him moving on to other world capitals to take a bow as the head of a distinct, democratic and economically powerful state on Chinese soil.

That is the Beijing nightmare, but it may not be a fantasy. Something similar might actually happen. Lee is expected to win the March 23 election handily, and some of his friends in Congress are thinking about inviting him to Washington. Other countries that do business with Taiwan are watching the U.S., considering whether to send invitations of their own. To many, not just those in Beijing, this looks very much like a road that leads to Taiwan's independence, a course the mainland will do almost anything to close off. Beijing considers its one-China policy inviolable, is determined to keep Taiwan from declaring itself a separate state, and threatens to use force if necessary to prevent it. Though China's armed forces would have a hard time carrying it out, no one takes the threat lightly.

Mao Zedong, the leader of the communist revolution that forced Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government to flee to the island of Taiwan in 1949, used to say he could wait 100 years to bring the province back into the fold. Today's men in Beijing are less patient, perhaps sensing that Taiwan is growing stronger and more distant all the time. Last week, in a formal speech at the Great Hall of the People, Premier Li Peng lectured the citizens of the island: No matter how they might choose their President, "they cannot change the fact that Taiwan is part of China and its leaders are only leaders of a region in China." Beijing prefers a peaceful reunification, said Li, the man generally credited with sending tanks against democracy demonstrators in 1989, "but we have not forsworn the use of force." Foreign Ministry spokesman Chen Jian even suggested a timetable of sorts, saying that after China reclaims Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999, then Taiwan will be "high on the agenda of the Chinese people."

Even in the short run Beijing is intensifying pressure, doing its best to influence the coming election and stifle Taiwan's efforts to increase its international standing. During the cold war, the government in Taipei officially agreed with Beijing that there was only one China and Taiwan was part of it. Now Lee, a native-born Taiwanese, favors a kind of peaceful coexistence and prolonged status quo. Three years ago, Taiwan said it intended to rejoin the U.N. "as soon as possible," not as China, but as an entity with as much legitimacy as, say, South Korea. Last month Senegal became the 31st country to establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Beijing, says Bertrand Tsai, a political scientist at the National Taiwan University, is "terrified that the whole world may reconsider its policy on Taiwan."

Chinese officials complain that Taiwan would not be so feisty without U.S. encouragement. Were Washington to warn Taipei it would get no help if China attacked to bring the province to heel, says an official in Beijing, "then Taiwan would be more moderate." Mainlanders saw evidence of U.S. sympathies in the news, vigorously leaked by Taipei, that the aircraft carrier Nimitz and four escort vessels had sailed through the Taiwan Strait in December. It was the first American naval presence in the strait since 1979, when Washington switched its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have been sending their own signals, some of them strongly worded. One official told former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Freeman last year that Beijing had a plan to fire a missile a day for 30 days at Taiwan if Lee did not halt his campaign for international recognition. The U.S. would not intervene, the official said, because it would not risk losing Los Angeles--presumably to nuclear missile attack--in order to protect Taiwan.

Chinese spokesmen denied all this publicly, but a source in Beijing said the Politburo has discussed and approved an escalating series of military measures that China could use to force Taiwanese leaders to drop the idea of independence. "The aim," says a Chinese official who is familiar with the contingency plan, "is to force Taiwan to give up taidu [Taiwan independence], not to launch an attack."

For months the Chinese thought they could engineer Lee's defeat at the polls by making clear their hostility to him, beginning with their show of fury after he was allowed to visit the U.S. last June. Now they concede that Lee will be re-elected, and they are concentrating their efforts on cooling his enthusiasm for diplomacy. "They expect Lee to win," says a Western diplomat in Beijing, "and only hope they can modify his behavior."

American policymakers assume a declaration of Taiwan's independence would trigger an attack from the mainland. But they also believe some of the tough talk from Beijing these days reflects a struggle for supreme power, given that Deng Xiaoping, the ailing senior leader, is out of the picture. None of the contenders can afford to look soft on an issue as vital as Taiwan. The problem with such posturing is that it might inspire riskier behavior than Beijing really intends.

On President Lee's side, there may be a temptation to count on U.S. help. In 1950, when North Korea invaded the South, the Truman Administration sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to keep the communists from seizing the island. In 1954 the U.S. and Taiwan signed a mutual-defense treaty. Even now, despite Beijing's displeasure, Washington is selling Taiwan combat aircraft and other equipment.

The U.S. is bound by legislation passed in 1979, the Taiwan Relations Act, to view an attack on the island as "a threat to the peace and security" of the region and "of grave concern to the U.S." The Clinton Administration has not spelled out what it would do in case the Chinese civil war turned hot again. Says a China specialist at the State Department: "The folks in Taiwan who might do something rash should not assume we would come to their aid, and the folks in Beijing who might do something militarily should not assume we won't." Such lack of clarity could lead to miscalculations. "Would we get involved in fighting a war with China?" the diplomat muses. "I don't know."

Policymakers in Washington note that if he is re-elected, Lee will have to make a clear choice between soothing or defying Beijing. They believe he will decide on a calming approach, and Beijing is counting on Washington to urge him to do exactly that. But reverting to a long-established status quo will not advance China's demand for reunification nor expunge its vision of a Taiwan drifting further and further away.

--Reported by Dean Fischer/ Washington, Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing, and Donald Shapiro/Taipei

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON, JAIME A. FLORCRUZ AND MIA TURNER/BEIJING, AND DONALD SHAPIRO/TAIPEI