International Business : Progress Made in New U.S.-China Trade Contracts, Brown Says : Asia: But Beijing warns America about warming relations with Taiwan.

BEIJING — In a trade-oriented prelude to next week’s summit in New York, Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown said Wednesday that the United States and China have made progress in negotiating about $20 billion worth of new U.S. contracts involving energy, aviation and telecommunication projects.

Brown, the most senior American official to visit Beijing since a breakdown in relations between the two nations this summer over Taiwan, avoided political differences and emphasized the enormous business stakes involved in the fragile U.S.-China relationship in a three-day visit that concluded Wednesday.

But in a Wednesday meeting with Brown, Chinese President Jiang Zemin used the opportunity to criticize the Clinton Administration for permitting Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui to visit the United States last spring. China considers Taiwan a renegade province, destined to be reunified with the mainland.

“Taiwan is a sensitive issue,” official state radio reported that Jiang told Brown. “We hope that the United States has learned a lesson.”

President Clinton and Jiang, who also serves as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, will meet Tuesday in New York, where both leaders will attend ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

For the Administration, the summit offers a chance to repair damage done to U.S.-China relations by the Lee visit, which China claimed was a violation of America’s “one China” policy. For Jiang, the summit will help cement his position as the leading candidate to replace the ailing, 91-year-old Deng Xiaoping at the pinnacle of Chinese power.

In a sign of slowly ebbing tensions between the two countries, China announced that it is returning its ambassador, Li Daoyu, to Washington this week. He was withdrawn four months ago after the flap over the visit by Taiwan’s president. Brown, one of the leading China boosters in the Administration, said he sees the return of the ambassador as “a very good signal as we participate in the ramp-up to the summit.”

In announcing the potential new deals for U.S. businesses in China, Brown was light on specifics, stating only that the breakdown involved $8.5 billion in energy related projects; $10.5 billion in transportation contracts, and $500 million in the telecommunications field. Among the deals under consideration are projects to build a giant coal slurry pipeline; competition with Europe’s Airbus to build a new 100-seat aircraft, and a plan to build a global satellite station.

Stung by criticism that he had exaggerated the accomplishments of a trade mission to China last year, when he announced more than $6 billion in new contracts, Brown was more cautious this trip. In interviews, he admitted that the most valuable of the previously announced contracts, involving more than $3 billion in energy deals, were still being held up by the Chinese State Planning Commission. But he said that he has won assurances from Chinese officials that most of the contracts would be honored.

Indeed, he received unusually strong public support from his counterpart in the Chinese government, Wu Yi, China’s minister of foreign trade and economic cooperation. At what was billed as a photo appearance, Wu criticized foreign reporters and defended Brown, calling reports questioning the success of his previous visit unfair.

“Last year, when Secretary Brown was in China,” Wu said, “he racked up about six billion U.S. dollars worth of contracts. Certainly, some of them were letters of intent. And some were big projects. I believe it will take quite a long period of time for those large projects to be implemented. I want to say that the projects for which contracts were signed . . . are now well under way.”