Public Relations: The Empire State Building this week will illuminate red and yellow, celebrating China's 60 years of communist rule. There are many things to appreciate about China, but communism isn't one of them.
What was the Empire State Building thinking in lighting up in celebration of China's long communist rule?
Amid all the charming reasons the classical 102-story skyscraper colors the Gotham sky at night — the 70th anniversary of "The Wizard of Oz," El Museo del Barrio's reopening, Columbus Day and Gabrielle's Angel Foundation, according to its Web site — China stands as a negative outlier.
Cynics call it recognition that the Chinese, who buy U.S. debt, now own us. But this looks more like a thoughtless confusion of China with its communist government, in perhaps the same impulse that prompts some to set up kitschy eateries bearing photos of Mao.
Recognizing China's regime with bright lights does New York's most visible landmark no honor at all.
China's 6,000-year-old history and civilization are loaded with things to celebrate — from its invention of paper money and fireworks, to its great cuisines, its Taoist philosophy, the daring historic voyages of Sanbao (a possible model for Sinbad), millions of Overseas Chinese, and perhaps the awed arrival of Marco Polo into the Middle Kingdom, which ignited the Age of Exploration.
Much of the story of civilization is rooted in the West's longing to connect with China — and this is not a finished story. In 1989, China saw brave young people stand up to tanks in the name of liberty at Tiananmen Square, an event surely worthy of the Empire State Building's honor as a beacon of freedom.
So it's discordant and jarring to see the tyranny that's plagued China for 60 years now the object of the skyscraper's approbation.
"Would the Empire State Building honor the government of Sudan or the birth of Nazi Germany?" asked Thor Halvorssen, whose Human Rights Foundation has an office in this building. "It's sad that a symbol of free enterprise honors the butchers of Beijing."
Communism is the root of the honor and nothing has harmed China so much. The nightmare began with Mao Zedong in 1949. He imported the alien ideology that is still around, diluted only because the authorities made such an economic hash of the country. By Mao's 1976 death, his successors had no choice but to open up.
Before that, the communist regime was responsible for wars, purges and famine on a scale untold in human civilization. According to University of Hawaii historian R.J. Rummel, the communist regime is responsible for the deaths of nearly 77 million people.
"... this equation of power is not limited to democide (murder by government). ... Power also breeds violence and war and all their associated killing. War, revolution and democide are as natural to power as the lust for power is to our species," Rummel wrote.
The writings of Nien Cheng and Harry Wu, in the telling of their personal stories, describe just how cruel the Chinese regime has been to millions of innocents.
"So much for the statistics," Rummel adds. "These numbers alone do not measure the pain and suffering involved. For each person murdered, there remain grieving relatives and possibly broken homes and children. How many more died as a consequence is itself unknown and unestimated here. Then many of those killed did not die easy; often it was by inches, under torture, through starvation, overwork and exposure, or from painful wounds. These statistics only reflect in small measure the monstrous human misery."
The suffering in China isn't confined to the past. Xinjiang's Rebiya Kadeer and Tibet's Dalai Lama continue to speak out about the depredations of the communism that has never stopped persecuting its ethnic minorities who challenge its rule.
And with an unrepentant regime, which still enslaves 8 million in its prison camps called Laogai, this will be the reality of China until it faces the errors of the past.
The Empire State Building's managers who mainstreamed this lighting display ought to have known this.
They run a great American symbol of freedom and enterprise, dear to the hearts of Americans because it still stands after 9/11.
To use the building as a lighted billboard to congratulate a regime whose cruelty is a matter of record ought to be protested.
China's long history is well worth honoring from the Empire State Building. But it's China's enterprising and freedom-loving people who deserve the honor, not its oppressive communist regime.
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