WASHINGTON INSIGHT

BRIEFING NOTES: President Clinton’s unsteady start is stirring distant concern: Chinese officials are “befuddled by the befuddlement” they see in the new White House, reports Charles Jones, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who was in Beijing recently on a trip sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. . . . Senate jester Bob Dole (R-Kan.) quips that his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, president of the American Red Cross, has one up on politicians: “She asks for your money and your blood.”