Tuesday, June 23, 1998; Page A16

LI HAI, 44, a former teacher at the Chinese Medical College, is serving a nine-year sentence in Beijing's Liangxiang Prison. His crime: assembling a list of people jailed for taking part in pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From the Beijing area alone, he documented more than 700. Of those, 158 -- mostly workers, rather than students -- received sentences of more than nine years and are presumed still held. Many were sentenced to life in prison, from a 22-year-old named Sun Chuanheng to a 76-year-old named Wang Jiaxiang. Li Hai himself was convicted of "prying into and gathering . . . state secrets."

We thought of Mr. Li as we read President Clinton's explanation in Newsweek yesterday of "Why I'm Going to Beijing." Mr. Clinton wrote of the "real progress -- though far from enough" that China has made in human rights during the past year. That progress, according to the president, consists of the release of "several prominent dissidents"; President Jiang Zemin's receiving a delegation of American religious leaders; and China's announcement of its "intention to sign" an important international treaty on human rights. That's a rather threadbare litany, even before you take account of the fact that two of the three releases for which the administration takes credit relate to dissidents who have been forced into exile, and that China has not said when it will ratify the human rights treaty, even if -- as President Jiang stated in a separate Newsweek interview -- it signs the document this fall.

How meager these accomplishments in human rights really are becomes clear when you stack them up against the administration's own decidedly modest goals back in 1996, when it already had downgraded the priority of human rights. According to reporting by The Post's Barton Gellman, the Clinton administration offered China a package deal in November of that year: It would no longer support a United Nations resolution calling attention to China's human rights abuses if China would release seven prominent dissidents, sign two international treaties on human rights, allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Chinese prisons and establish a forum of U.S and Chinese human rights groups. When China failed to fully meet any of the demands, and rebuffed the United States on two of them, Mr. Clinton said that was good enough. This again calls to mind what is disquieting about his China policy: not that he is pursuing a policy of engagement but that the engagement too often is on China's terms.

Tomorrow Mr. Clinton will leave for China, the first president to visit since the Tiananmen massacre. His aides promise that he will speak out on human rights while there, and there is a chance he will meet with the mother of a student killed in Tiananmen. The first could be valuable if his remarks are broadcast on Chinese television; the second, an important symbol, especially because many relatives of Tiananmen victims continue to be persecuted and harassed. But Mr. Clinton's remarks, above all, should be honest. For the sake of Li Hai, the 158 he documented and the many he did not find, Mr. Clinton should not trumpet "real progress" in a human rights record where no such progress exists.