By A.M. ROSENTHAL

NEW YORK, June 3, 1997, (NY Times) -- Now in one document, available with a phone call, are two revealing exposures of the failure of President Clinton's policy of putting trade above all other U.S. interests in China.

The first is a paragraph from the State Department's report about human rights in 1996. Despite pressures from inside and outside government, these annual reports remain in candor and courage a credit to America.

Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Democratic leader in the House, included it in a devastating analysis of the variety of damages done to the U.S. by the Administration's trade-obsessed China policy.

In that one paragraph, the State Department report sums up what has happened to dissidents eight years after the Tiananmen massacre, two years after Mr. Clinton traded human rights in China and *Tibet* for the mirage of the China trade:

"All public dissent against the party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at year's end. Even those released from prison were kept under tight surveillance and often prevented from taking employment or otherwise resuming a normal life."

The Gephardt dissection is part of a gathering storm against Mr. Clinton's China policy. In a speech to Detroit businessmen, Mr. Gephardt dealt straight on with the injuries it does to America's economy, and security.

The economic price of worshiping the China-trade idol includes a trade deficit with China now approaching $50 billion annually. Mr. Gephardt details the cost in American jobs of competing with China's "Stalinist" version of the free market complete with prison and slave labor and mandated survival-level wages. Now there's an increasing Chinese switchover from cheap toys to more profitable manufacture cheap high tech. China keeps costs minimal by blackmailing patents and factory plans out of Western companies part of the cost of doing business with Beijing.

Security: While raking in American money, China sells cruise missiles, a chemical plant and material for chemical weapons to Iran. China also produces an ICBM that Mr. Gephardt points out could threaten the Pacific Basin and the continental United States.

But throughout his speech, Mr. Gephardt presents human rights as not only a moral issue but a goal fundamental to American interests, attained time and again in the 20th century, from the fight against Hitler and the Soviet empire to the struggle against South African apartheid.

Naturally along comes the special Washingtonian political hypocrisy. Mr. Gephardt is accused of trying to get the Democratic Presidential nomination by emphasizing the difference between himself and the Clinton policies that Vice President Al Gore will have to carry out if he is chosen.

No! It cannot be true that a candidate tries to show the moral and policy differences between himself and a probable opponent!

What was Mr. Clinton doing in the 1992 campaign when he attacked President Bush's "coddling" of dictatorships and promised to link tariff and human rights? After election, Constant Heart threw linkage away the China business lobby just changed his mind.

That opened whole new vistas of cynicism for America. But if we now say we will not pay serious attention to any politician who dares reach to the Presidency we will be giving Mr. Clinton's vision of faithfulness lasting control over our own minds. Most of us do not long for that.

Mr. Gephardt's China speech and that State Department paragraph should be read by Americans who oppose the Clinton China policy, for ammunition, and Americans who support it, to test their beliefs. Phone the Gephardt office: 202-225-0100.

Whoever inherits or accepts Mr. Clinton's China policy better run scared. A national human rights movement is growing, partly because of increasing knowledge of persecution of Christians in China. It includes Representative Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, a great longtime liberal human rights leader, and Gary Bauer, of the conservative Family Research Council. Mr. Bauer says what people like Representatives Pelosi and Gephardt so devoutly believe:

"Cheap goods bought with blood cost too much."