WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 -- The Bush administration is debating how hard to press China on human rights, and may be tempted to drop condemnation of China at an annual human rights meeting next month in preference for what some see as a more pragmatic approach to extracting reforms from the Chinese.

During most of the Clinton administration, the United States was at the forefront of reprimanding China at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, a strategy that the Chinese always tried to block to stave off embarrassment.

This year, as China faces a vote by the International Olympic Committee in July on whether Beijing will be host for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government has offered a number of inducements -- including ratification of a United Nations rights covenant -- to persuade Washington to drop the traditional resolution.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said at his confirmation hearing that a recommendation to President Bush on whether the United States would support a resolution at the commission would be "the No. 1 item on our plate," but he did not say what he would do about it.

In a meeting with the departing Chinese ambassador, Li Zhaoxing, General Powell warned that he would raise human rights issues and do so "frankly," a State Department spokesman said. China needs to follow "the rule of law and to be exposed to the powerful forces of free enterprise systems and democracy," General Powell told Mr. Li.

The words differed little from those of the former secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, but they carried particular import coming the day after five followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. [Editor's note: the suicide has nothing to do with Falun Gong. See

http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2001/Jan/23/VSF012301_3.html .]

But administration officials said that first foray into the China human rights debate gave no clues about the attitude toward the annual resolution of condemnation in Geneva.

General Powell faces an array of liberal and conservative human rights advocates who want the administration to support a resolution -- even though, as in the past, it is almost certain to be defeated. These advocates argue that little will change in China if the United States accepts the alternatives, and that China will gain a moral victory by not being reprimanded.

The annual human rights report by the State Department, due at the end of this month, is expected to say -- as it did last year -- that the human rights situation in China has continued to deteriorate, with religious persecution particularly intense, and thus to increase pressure on General Powell for introducing a resolution.

The annual Geneva meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission begins on March 19, but lobbying is already at a high pitch. Last week, leaders of seven human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, wrote to General Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, urging them to press ahead with the human rights resolution.

One factor General Powell must consider, officials and human rights advocates said, is whether the United States can do more to improve human rights in China by accepting some of the Chinese proposals.

The Chinese have offered, for instance, to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which would oblige them to accept visits from officials assigned to hold China to international standards. The Chinese, however, would agree to ratify the covenant only without the section that calls for the right to form trade unions.

The Chinese have also signaled that they might be ready to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons in China and to allow the United States Customs Service access to suspected prison labor sites.

Another gesture by the Chinese, according to human rights experts, is a memorandum of understanding reached with Mary Robinson, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, which will allow for Chinese and United Nations experts to meet to discuss reform of China's re-education labor camps.

The first of these gatherings is scheduled for late this month, just before the Geneva assembly -- timing that human rights advocates say should not diminish an effort to condemn the Chinese at the assembly.

As General Powell considers his options, he is in the process of choosing an assistant secretary for human rights, who will organize the complicated diplomacy of winning support for a resolution at Geneva. Among candidates who have been interviewed are Lorne W. Craner, the president of the International Republican Institute, which monitors elections abroad, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, secretary of state of Ohio, an African-American who served as ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in the first Bush administration.