Published by: World Tibet Network News ISSUE ID: 97/10/20

WASHINGTON Oct 20 (AP) -- Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, in interviews with US news organizations, stood by his nation's policies on human rights and Tibet and made it clear he will carry the same message to Americans when he visits in a week.

Human rights is certain to be a dominant subject when Jiang, China's president and Communist Party chief, next weekend becomes the first Chinese leader to visit since the Chinese military crushed the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989.

Over the last few years, Jiang said in an interview with Time magazine in the edition reaching newsstands today, the United States-China relationship ''can be characterized like the weather: It has its ups and downs.''

He said a key purpose of his trip will be to deepen understanding because ''it is no easy task for the people of our two countries to really understand each other.''

He was generally upbeat, saying the two countries ''have a favorable opportunity for further improvement.'' A good relationship in the 21st century, he said, ''bears on the world's peace, stability, and prosperity.''

Diverging from communist rhetoric of the past, Jiang said, ''The US is not a country in decline, and I do not think that China and the US must come into conflict with one another.''

Jiang, 71, is a former mayor of Shanghai. In the Time interview and a separate interview published yesterday in The Washington Post, he rejected arguments that China is guilty of massive human rights abuses.

The most important human rights issue in China, he said, is ensuring that its 1.2 billion people have food and clothing. In that respect, ''the rights and freedoms that our people enjoy today are unprecedented.''

He told the Post: ''Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts and not absolute and general.''

Asked by Time if he should make some gesture on human rights during his trip, he retorted that China abolished slavery in Tibet when the communists moved into the area in 1950, just as America had abolished slavery during the Civil War. ''I believe the American people should be happy to see that,'' he said.

But Representative Henry Hyde, Republican of Illinois, said it would be only proper for Americans to demonstrate against China's human rights record as Jiang tours Hawaii, Williamsburg, Va., Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

''I think every opportunity should be availed to demonstrate to the Chinese leaders how much the civil rights abuses, the human rights abuses, are resented in this country and what an obstacle they are to normalizing healthy relationships between our two countries,'' Hyde said Saturday on CNN's ''Evans & Novak.''

While unlikely to make much progress on human rights, the two sides are working to complete a deal in which Jiang will pledge to end sales of antiship cruise missiles to Iran. The Post also quoted officials from the two countries as saying they will sign accords on avoiding naval incidents at sea and increasing cooperation in nuclear energy.