October 5, 1983

The Commerce Department said today that it is investigating whether Chinese textiles and apparel exported to the United States are being illegally subsidized. The department said it started the countervailing duty investigation Monday. It was set off by complaints filed last month by several domestic textile and apparel groups that the Chinese textiles are subsidized through dual exchange rates and therefore can be sold in this country below their real production costs.

The Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., said today that the House would take no action this year on a comprehensive bill to revise the nation's immigration laws, but the White House asked him to reconsider his decision. The Speaker's comments, at a meeting with reporters, suggested that such legislation was dead at least until January 1985. Members of Congress said there was little chance the bill would be taken up the House in 1984, an election year. In explaining why he did not want to bring the bill to the floor of the House, Mr. O'Neill said that it was opposed by many Hispanic Americans, including Hispanic members of Congress, and that there was no clear constituency in favor of the legislation.

Quotation of the Day ''First there was Saturday football, then there was Sunday football, then all-day Sunday football, then Monday Night Football and now there are Thursday night games and new football leagues playing almost all year.

A cascade of petrodollars over the last 10 years has dramatically transformed the contours of life in the Persian Gulf. But it has also brought economic and social problems that remain unresolved. And the decade of apparently limitless wealth is ending with the clear realization that oil revenues, although huge, are indeed finite. Oil production has slowed, and the global recession has shrunk the markets that the region's shiny new industrial installations were designed to serve. This is raising serious questions about whether the OPEC members along the Gulf have spent their billions wisely, and whether they have acquired the political leverage that these billions should have brought them.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1983 Companies Some $60 million in precious metals may not exist, despite the sale of the assets to thousands of small investors, an audit of a little- known gold dealer suggested. The audit was made in connection with the suicide last Wednesday of Alan David Saxon, chairman of the company, Bullion Reserve of North America. (Page A1.) Mary E. Cunningham resigned from Seagram, saying she had completed her task of devising a strategy for its wine division, which recently purchased Wine Spectrum from Coca-Cola. According to industry sources, however, the Spectrum deal was actually at variance with Miss Cunningham's recommendations. (D1.)