After threats early in his admnistration to end most-favored-nation status to China, President Clinton backed away from his position, saying he prefered engagement to estrangement. The danger in his second stance is that the United States will mistake the release this week of political prisoner Wei Jingsheng as a sign of significant progress in China’s human-rights conditions.

While Clinton administration officials said the president cut no deals with President Jiang Zemin during his U.S. tour last month, it was clear the United States for years has been pleading with China to do something beneficent so that the two countries could continue to trade without all those pesky people worried about human rights interferring in the process of making a buck. In the past, China has ignored or belittled this plea. Perhaps it was Mr. Zemin’s need for an international boost that caused a different reaction this time.

Certainly, the release of Mr. Wei, after a torturous 18 years in prison, is no small matter. His continued protest and sharp pen in the face of endless years of physical and psychological brutality make him a man of heroic proportion. In fact it was his reportedly poor health that may have brought his freedom. But to suggest Mr. Wei’s release represents any change of policy in China is to ignore recent history and the fact that policies affecting thousands of other imprisioned political dissidents have not changed.

Deng Xiaoping’s death in February presented China with the first opportunity for substantial ideological change in a generation. Under Mr. Zemin, countless businesses have been or are planned to be made private, increasing China’s importance in global trade. But human-rights questions have not yet followed the same pattern. Indeed, speculations about Mr. Wei’s release have gone from the observation that China’s leaders wanted him out of prison before he died and became a martyr there to the suggestion, more likely, that his illness is being overstated and is an excuse to meet an agreement with President Clinton.

Though China watchers don’t have a single answer for the event, no one is saying that Mr. Zemin acted out of compassion for Mr. Wei or to change his country’s history of repression. But that, in the end, is the best way for the Clinton administration to measure its effect on its trading partner.