Members of both political parties express horror at accusations that the Chinese may have tried to use covert campaign donations to influence American policy, but the United States has long meddled in other nations' internal affairs.

Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad.

The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries, including China.

The endowment has financed unions in France, Paraguay, the Philippines and Panama. In the mid-1980's, it provided $5 million to Polish emigres to keep the Solidarity movement alive. It has underwritten moderate political parties in Portugal, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Northern Ireland. It provided a $400,000 grant for political groups in Czechoslovakia that backed the election of Vaclav Havel as president in 1990. For the Nicaraguan election of 1990, it provided more than $3 million in ''technical'' assistance, some of which was used to bolster Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the presidential candidate favored by the United States.