FORUM REJECTS CUTOFF ON HIGH-TECH TARIFFS.

Byline: Marcus Eliason Associated Press 

President Clinton and fellow Pacific Rim leaders assembled again Saturday to try to move their countries toward freer trade, after their officials made only meager progress in a week of hard presummit bargaining.

Even before Clinton arrived in Manila late Saturday, ministers of the 18-government Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum rebuffed a U.S. demand to remove all tariffs on information technology in four years.

The opposition came from poorer countries anxious to protect their new high-tech industries, crystallizing the problem that APEC faces in bringing together so many disparate economies into a single free-trade area.

The APEC summit is the annual highlight of an East-West relationship, bringing together leaders as diverse as the American president, the sultan of Brunei, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea and the president of China.

Each of the four summits so far has ended amicably and moved the world's fastest-growing economic region a step closer to its goal of free trade by 2020.

This year's summit has produced a slew of pledges, each seemingly insignificant by itself, but all contributing to a broader picture of falling tariffs and vanishing red tape - like Japan allowing imports of products without Japanese labels, or Taiwan letting foreign law firms practice there.

The summit also enables Clinton to meet Chinese President Jiang Zemin today, for the first time in 13 months.

Disputes over human rights, trade, Chinese weapons exports and Taiwan have bedeviled their relationship. But if their summit ends with an announcement of an exchange of visits, it will confirm the impression that the relationship is mending.

``Our relations with China are much better than they've been in quite a while,'' Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor told reporters.

Presummit negotiations among officials and ministers were dominated by the U.S. push for a united APEC front on information technology, which encompasses everything from pocket calculators to supercomputers.

The United States, Japan and other rich countries hoped for a clear-cut joint statement they can take to World Trade Organization negotiations on freeing up the $500 billion-a-year market for computers, semiconductors, software and telecommunications.

For consumers, that would mean cheaper electronic items like calculators, mobile phones and alarm clocks, all of which contain semiconductors, said Denise Yue, Hong Kong's trade secretary.

Washington wants all the tariffs abolished by 2000. But under pressure from developing countries, led by Malaysia, the final statement from APEC ministers set no deadlines or tariff levels.

``Opening up the market of the rich to the poor is meaningless if the poor have nothing to sell,'' Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said.

Ultimately, the APEC ministers only endorsed the effort by World Trade Organization members to work toward an unspecified ``information technology agreement.''

Acting U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky dismissed suggestions that the vague language was a defeat for Washington. APEC members agreed that WTO negotiators should reach an agreement no later than their Dec. 9 to 13 meeting in Singapore, she said.

``What the United States has sought from APEC is the political commitment to conclude an agreement . . . the will, the political will unequivocally to move forward,'' Barshefsky told reporters.