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When lit, the Empire State is a lovely sight.  Yet last night’s display cast a rather ugly glow.  Why?  Because given the nation it is honoring, we must ask the sponsors of this celebration which highlights of China’s history during those sixty years they especially want to honor.

Might it be the murder of Christian missionaries in the late 40s and 50s?  How about the killing of millions of Chinese during Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign of the mid-fifties? During those years, Communist authorities pressed rural Chinese to modernize, demanding such insanities as backyard steel mills.

China enveloped Tibet in the late 50s. That ancient Buddhist land is still being suppressed and its unique culture eradicated fifty years later. The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans still live in exile.

In the mid-60s, Chairman Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which left more millions dead. Fanatical Red Guards beat and brutalized anyone who had exposure to Western Culture—and even trashed China’s revered cultural heritage.

China scholar Simon Leys wrote in Chinese Shadows about the Little Red Book of Mao’s banal “thoughts.” Millions of Red Guards memorized, chanted, and used that book to beat their elders over the head. Leys—the nom de plume of a respected expert in Chinese antiquities—described the Cultural Revolution as an exercise in which people had their skulls opened, their brains scooped out, and their brain pans filled with Maoist concrete. He didn’t mean it literally; at least, I hope he didn’t.

When, in utter exhaustion and desperation, the rulers of China opened up to the West in the 1970s, Communist Party leader Teng Hsiao-p’ing charmed liberals here with his supposed reforms and rationality. But Teng also instituted one of the most brutal of population control programs in history.

Stanford University scholar Steven Mosher courageously exposed to the world the massive forced abortions that resulted from China’s One Child policy. An estimated 50 million forced abortions have occurred in China, almost all of them attributable to the Communist Party’s inflexible rule.

President Obama, in one of his first acts, revoked Ronald Reagan’s policy of preventing U.S. foreign aid from being used to fund abortion. Mr. Obama is once again giving our tax money to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has been complicit in China’s One Child policy since its inception.

And let’s not forget Tienanmen Square.  In 1989, thousands of student demonstrators were brutalized by soldiers ostensibly given drugs and alcohol to inspire them to murder.  Tanks and armored vehicles rolled over young men and women.  Others were gunned down by order of the Communist rulers in Beijing.

Wang Wei-Lin was the lone demonstrator who stood up to a column of tanks from the People’s Liberation Army.  His unforgettable image was seen around the world. What the world did not see, but what Chinese democracy advocates told me ten years ago, was that Wang Wei-Lin was escorted into a nearby hotel and there strangled to death by the regime’s security forces. Also summarily executed, I was informed, was the tank driver. He was killed, they say, for not running right over Wang Wei-Lin.

Last year, China’s Communist rulers put on a brave face and invited the world to come to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Their factories had to be closed down, however, and motorists banned for weeks before the Olympic crowds arrived. That was to allow the deadly smog to clear so that the runners could be seen by the spectators and so that the archers could see their targets.

It’s one thing for Communists to do vicious and shameful things. It’s entirely something else for free people—at least people who think themselves free and who, presumably, would like for their children to remain free—to “honor” such an odious regime. Sixty years of inhuman tyranny is nothing to celebrate.

I’ve always been proud to be a New Yorker. I have an ornament of the Empire State Building on my Christmas tree every year. Not this year. I’m too red-faced—with shame, shame for my city.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.