International Business : Executives Hail Trade Mission to Beijing as Highly Productive : Commerce: Private and official interests were served. Future projects were planned, and other deals were finalized.

Southern California business executives who accompanied U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown on his recent trade mission to China returned with briefcases brimming with contacts for future deals and an upbeat attitude about the economic potential of the most populous nation.

“I came away from the trip with a real sense that things are happening there,” Lodwrick Cook, chairman of Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield Corp., said this week. “Parts of the country are really booming.”

And China’s developing economy is generating demand for products that U.S. businesses are eager to supply. After the week-long trip ended Saturday, American companies returned with $6 billion worth of new contracts.

The Brown mission also reassured the executives that the Clinton Administration is firmly committed to extending economic ties with China, economists and analysts said.

“It was very appropriate for the government to make the trip, particularly due to the size and potential China represents as an export market,” said Nicholas Lardy, a professor of international studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

California was well represented on the China trip--by nine of the 24 executives accompanying Brown--and many of them shared ARCO Chairman Cook’s positive assessment of the results.

“For the first time I got to see China firsthand, and the opportunities there are tremendous,” said John Bryson, chairman of SCE Corp., parent of the Los Angeles-based Southern California Edison electric utility. “What they plan to do in the next year is almost as large as Southern California Edison’s entire capacity,” he said. “In terms of power supply, it is the largest market in the world.”

And SCE will be there, Bryson said. Its Mission Energy division is negotiating three deals for projects that will build, own and operate power plants in China.

For other executives, the trip presented opportunity to advance talks already in progress.

Safi Qureshey, chairman and chief executive officer of Irvine-based computer maker AST Research Inc., said his company continued negotiations to sell computer hardware to the Chinese government. Qureshey also said he spoke with officials of China’s Education Commission about introducing computers into classrooms.

Leslie McCraw, chairman of Fluor Daniel Inc. in Irvine, said he met with government officials and business leaders to discuss the company’s role in China. The construction company’s operating unit has had an office in Beijing since 1978 and has completed more than 70 projects in China, from hydrocarbon processing plants to electrical power facilities.

Economists tempered their praise for the China mission by noting that the $6 billion worth of new business completed during the trip will put only a small dent in the $23-billion U.S. trade deficit with China.

“We still have a very large trade deficit,” said Robert Lawrence, public policy professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

“Given that situation, it should not be at all surprising to find the U.S. government nudging the Chinese to reciprocate.”

Said Lardy of the University of Washington: “There is an enormous imbalance between the United States and China, and that will take a long time to correct.”

Observers also noted that many of the business contracts completed during the mission were negotiated far in advance.

Still, most agreed that the trip was an important step in government and private cooperation toward expanding trade between the two nations.

“The private-sector CEOs saw this as a chance to close some deals,” Brown said.

“It was extremely important to have the U.S. government standing shoulder to shoulder with them.”