By Steven Mufson

Gone is the Chinese honor guard that received President Clinton in Tiananmen Square 10 months ago. The gentle jousting between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin is over. All the banquets meant this week for U.S. officials visiting Beijing have been canceled -- and so have the visits.

U.S. Ambassador James Sasser, who last July stood in Tiananmen Square proud of his work repairing U.S.-China relations, spent the weekend cowering in an embassy building besieged by angry protesters. And yesterday Clinton, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright all made televised apologies to China in an effort to limit the collateral damage to U.S.-China relations from Friday's inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Asked where U.S.-China relations would go from here, one administration official grimly replied: "Up."

The diplomatic toll from Friday's attack, which took the lives of three Chinese, continued to mount. China suspended talks on human rights and arms proliferation. Jiang told Russian President Yeltsin it might veto a Kosovo resolution at the Security Council unless the bombing stops. The list of visits to China canceled since Friday includes those by officials from the State Department and the office of the U.S. trade representative, as well as musicians and business executives.

One administration official took to measuring good news by what did not happen: China did not pull out of talks on trade or North Korea. The only other relatively hopeful sign, analysts said, was that China's foreign minister presented a list of four demands that could probably be met in an effort to prevent further decline in U.S.-China ties.

"I understand that the Chinese feel this sense of frustration and rage right now, but I would hope that cooler heads would prevail, because we have much larger interests and long-term interests with the Chinese people and the Chinese government," said Cohen. "Hopefully we can help mollify those feelings of rage and anger and then restore a sense of calm and cordiality in our relations."

But few officials or China experts expected the wounds from the embassy bombing to heal any time soon.

Just as the Chinese army crackdown on student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square 10 years ago created an image -- of a lone protester standing before a tank -- that stayed in the minds of Americans, the Belgrade embassy bombing "has created a smoking hulk that will remain an image in Chinese minds for years to come," said David M. Lampton, a China expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. "We don't know what the bottom is here, but it's going to be long-lasting."

"I've seen relations at lower points," said former U.S. ambassador James Lilley, now at the American Enterprise Institute. "I was in the Korean War."

Lilley noted, however, that U.S.-China relations have had other ups and downs, including President Reagan's sale of advanced military equipment to Taiwan in 1982, the strain in ties after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and the U.S. visit by Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui and subsequent missile crisis in the Taiwan Straits in 1996.

Relations between the United States and China have been best when leaders of the two countries were willing to ignore such differences. When President Nixon first set foot in China, the Cultural Revolution was still in progress. When Clinton visited last year, he subjugated differences over trade and human rights to a grander notion of "building a strategic partnership for the 21st century."

This week, the notion of a "strategic partnership" seemed moribund. The bombing and China's position in the U.N. Security Council, where China holds a veto, highlight the yawning gap between the United States and China over the war in Kosovo.

Recent allegations that China stole American nuclear secrets or used front companies to obtain sensitive computer and industrial technology have also strained the concept of "strategic partnership."

"Personally, I never thought we had a strategic partnership with China," said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.). "We have to be realistic and talk about China as a strategic competitor, and hopefully not an adversary. We should be very alert that China is not our partner and never will be."

The notion of a strategic alliance was more plausible in Nixon's time, when China and the United States shared a common rival, the Soviet Union. But some conservative critics of U.S.-China relations were cheered yesterday at the thought that the embassy bombing might lead to the end of military exchanges between the two countries.

Above all, the recent strains in ties show that 20 years after the normalization of U.S.-China relations, those relations still are not entirely normal. Instead they are marred by distrust on both sides.

China still smarts over U.S. human rights criticism, U.S. military sales to Taiwan and the military and technology sanctions that were imposed after the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen crackdown. The United States has its own list of grievances over trade, human rights, espionage and nuclear proliferation.

Every negotiation seems painstaking to Americans; it took three months to agree on the translation of a customs agreement, and that was supposedly after negotiations had been successfully concluded. Chinese worry that the United States wants to "contain" China.

This week, the low-level distrust rose to a higher plane. Many Chinese officials said they felt Clinton's televised apology on Saturday, from the Oklahoma tornado site, was inadequate. Clinton apologized but added a reminder that President Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were the reasons for the bombing campaign. Chinese diplomats said they felt Clinton was trying to escape responsibility for the embassy attack.

"I don't like this 'but,' " said one U.S.-based Chinese diplomat. "Chinese people will doubt the sincerity of his apology."

Chinese diplomats also felt that Albright's written note of regret, delivered to the Chinese ambassador in Washington Saturday night, and Clinton's own note, delivered Sunday morning, were insufficient.

Some administration officials chafed at such suggestions. The normal route for such communications would have been for Sasser to pay a visit to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing. But, one White House official noted, Sasser was stuck inside the embassy.

Nonetheless, top Clinton administration officials, who have faced much political criticism for promoting closer ties with Beijing, did their best yesterday to assuage Chinese feelings and ease suspicions.

"I want to reiterate our profound sorrow at the loss of life and injuries resulting from NATO's mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade," Albright said. She promised an explanation "for this tragic error."