March 13, 1994

Chinese officials today flatly rejected Secretary of State Warren Christopher's demand that Beijing improve its human rights performance and warned that stripping China of its trade privileges would backfire. In a day punctuated by harsh and often acrimonious exchanges, the Chinese also accused the United States of breaking Chinese law by meeting secretly with a leading dissident last month.

MAKING IT WORK 3 The boys of Company 176 spend a lot of time waiting, and cooking and polishing. Sometimes they also put out fires. NEW YORKERS & CO. 4 Amid the silent relics of Brooklyn's waterfront glory, there's business, and hope, in America's chocoholic habit.

MADELINE MARINO, president of N. J. Marino Associates, a construction-management company here, passed out hard hats to 10 teen-age girls from Woodland Hills High School in Greenburgh as they went from the office trailer into the Manufacturers Outlet Center of Westchester County, a mall that Mrs. Marino's company is renovating. No construction work was actually being done at the time, but the bright blue hats were symbolic of the national effort that brought the teen-agers here -- an attempt to open opportunities for women in trades and professions that have traditionally been considered men's work and that often pay better than traditional women's jobs.

Down on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, a much-trafficked spot in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, sits a parking lot that has long awaited a better use. Now it is to get one. The 26- by 101-foot lot is to be the site of a five-story office building, with retail on the street floor and art galleries above (this is, after all, SoHo). The building itself, although sheathed in a contemporary metal skin, will be reminiscent of the cast-iron spirit of the neighborhood.

Ordinarily, a tax bill is as big as it gets for the lobbyists, public-relations specialists, direct-mail wizards, pollsters, consultants and assorted other players in the political industrial complex of the nation's capital. But that was before health care. Other issues may have the headlines, but health care is what has truly taken over the culture of the capital in the past few weeks, as bills begin moving in Congress and all the carefully laid plans to sway or woo or frighten 534 lawmakers come into play.