This Is No Time to Visit China, Mr. Nixon

PARIS -- ''We still have a group of senior comrades who are alive, we still have the army and we also have a group of core cadres who took part in the revolution at various times. That is why it was relatively easy for us to handle the present matter.''

The speaker was Deng Xiaoping, addressing China's military leaders on June 9. ''The present matter'' was the slaughter of hundreds, perhaps thousands of unarmed civilians in Tiananmen Square five days earlier. And yet, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are now contemplating separate visits to China,visits Deng would use to restore an aura of normalcy and legitimacy that the killings removed.

Nixon and Kissinger should not go. Morally, diplomatically and politically -- they should not go. And they should not go for the sake of their own reputations outside America and, in history, as clear-eyed and skillful actors in foreign policy.

That judgment will sound odd to Americans who think Nixon's reputation as a world leader was destroyed by Watergate and his resignation under the threat of impeachment. But Nixon still has much to lose. His opening to China, his aborted but promising Middle East peace effort and his handling of the Soviet Union won a sustained admiration for him among foreigners unable or unwilling to understand the domestic havoc Nixon and his White House aides wrought.

Nixon should consider the frank admission made by Deng in his speech to the army. To prevail against students seeking democratic freedoms, Deng had to rely on the old men whose view of the world was shaped, as his was, in the bloody battle to impose communism on China during and after World War II. What they have just done is simply another step in the long march of revolutionary communism.

Deng made clear in his speech why the martyrs of Tiananmen Square were killed: ''Their goal was to establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West ... Their real aim was to overthrow the Communist Party and topple the socialist system.'' They were not killed because of isolated incidents of violence that may have been committed by workers or students.

Why would a well-known Commie-hater like Richard Nixon even consider ''honoring'' this moral monster with his presence? My guess is that it is simply too painful for Nixon to accept that the China he thought he had helped create turned out to be a chimera.

The surviving Chinese leaders who helped him create a stunning diplomatic triumph turned out to be vengeful men prepared to murder the future of their country. But for Nixon to admit this would seem to him to diminish his legacy and his claim to contemporary importance. The current rulers are his access to a China that no longer exists, if it ever did. But Nixon cannot see them for what they are.

By going to China now, Nixon would join Deng in establishing a political corollary to the rule of physics established by the great German physicist, Max Planck. Planck observed that no new propositions are accepted as law until the generation that established the existing laws dies off. Like the scientists, Deng and Nixon will draw closer to the fading campfire and pretend that nothing has changed, that the balance of power and diplomacy that they established are immutable.

The man who originally applied Planck's rule to politics and predicted that change would come only when the older generation of Chinese Communists died in power is now a fugitive hiding with his wife inside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He is Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist and dissident who almost certainly would be killed if he were turned out of the embassy.

How would Nixon handle Fang's presence at the embassy if he goes to Beijing? Would he feel comfortable asking to visit Zhao Ziyang, the deposed secretary general of the Communist Party who was the principal architect of economic reform, but who is now in disgrace because of his sympathy for the students?

If he cannot insist on seeing Zhao, Nixon should not go. If he does not know before he leaves America that he can bring Fang back with him, Nixon should not go. If he cannot be briefed by the staff members of the Academy of Social Sciences who were Zhao's proteges and who now face prison, Nixon should not go.

The issue is not whether the West should isolate and punish China. A decision by Nixon to stay at home inflicts neither isolation nor punishment on a nation of one billion people. The question is: Would Nixon go and bear moral witness to the people who fought against communism and for freedom? Or would he go to reassure the killers that they still count in the world?

Nixon, Kissinger and President Bush, all supposedly practitioners of Realpolitik, give away the leverage the United States could be using on China by arguing that it does no good to isolate or punish China. This is judgment based on sentiment and nostalgia -- and on an illusion of ''friendship.'' Deng and his blood stained associates have to be judged by what they are today, not by what Nixon and the others want them to be.