CHINESE LEADER'S VISIT TURNS INTO A REAL THREE-RING CIRCUS.

Byline: Elaine Sciolino The New York Times

For months, American and Chinese negotiators have gone head to head on China's weapons sales, human rights record and unfair trade practices in preparation for the most strategically important summit meeting of the Clinton presidency.

But the issues that have particularly vexed China lovers and China haters alike as they await the arrival of Chinese President Jiang Zemin next week are far less lofty. They include his reception by Congress, his tour of America and, most delicate of all, his failed talks over the tent.

Those negotiations involved a heated, high-ceilinged, circuslike white tent with a hardwood floor suitable for ballroom dancing that would have been pitched on the South Lawn. That way, up to 400 guests could have been invited to the formal state dinner set for Wednesday night.

The Chinese swiftly rejected the idea. Eighteen years ago, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was feted in the elegant, but much smaller, East Room when President Carter invited him for a state visit, they said. Jiang, who is also commander of the People's Liberation Army and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, deserves no less, they said.

Indeed, much to the Clinton administration's dismay, in preparing the summit meeting, China's army of advance men has stuck to a tough mantra: ``Just like Deng.''

``We wanted to invite a lot of people and give Jiang maximum exposure, but they decided it couldn't be different from Deng,'' an exasperated senior White House official said this week. ``They're quickly becoming the crowd that doesn't miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It's like dealing with the French - only worse.''

The smaller venue led to a bitter struggle over who to put on the A-list for the geopolitical event of the season and who to shunt to the B-list for a lunch given by Vice President Al Gore at the State Department earlier that day.

It also meant that the news conference with Clinton and Jiang had to be scheduled not in the East Room but in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building, which the Chinese interpreted as part of a larger plot to downgrade the summit meeting, another senior administration official said.

Jiang rejected an invitation to come to Washington in 1995 because he was offered only a ``working visit.'' He held out for a ``state visit,'' which comes with a red carpet at Andrews Air Force Base, a 21-gun howitzer salute on the White House lawn and the flying of the national flags throughout official Washington, capped by a formal White House dinner.

Now that Clinton is safely into his second term, a state visit is politically less risky.

That doesn't mean fewer headaches. When the Chinese suggested ways to keep demonstrators out of sight and earshot from their president and their press, the U.S. side found itself conducting lengthy seminars on the meaning of a free society.

Protests are scheduled in Washington and at other stops on Jiang's tour of America. During the state dinner Wednesday, the International Campaign for Tibet will host a ``stateless dinner'' at a nearby hotel. Actor Richard Gere, who plays an American businessman caught up in China's legal system in the new political thriller ``Red Corner,'' is a featured speaker.

Three days later Jiang speaks to an audience chosen by invitation and lottery at Harvard University. But immediately afterward, Harry Wu, the Chinese dissident who spent nearly two decades as a political prisoner, is to speak at the base of the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard.

``If the Chinese had had their way, they would have looked to have thousands of friendly, welcoming people along the way in the line of the television cameras,'' said Ezra Vogel, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, which invited Jiang to speak. ``We said we can't arrange people politically.''

As for the state dinner in Washington, the White House considers the guest list a closely held secret. But many of the invitees don't.

Mindful of the centrality of American business in foreign policy, the White House has invited representatives from some of the country's biggest investors in China, including Boeing, Westinghouse, United Technologies and General Motors.

Mindful also of China's desire to turn the summit meeting into a historic event, the White House has also invited former Presidents Bush and Ford (who are not attending), former President Carter (who is), former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James A. Baker III and Alexander Haig.