June 4 will be the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. So how has Mayor Bloomberg decided to mark the sad occasion? In New York last week, he joined Beijing’s unelected mayor, Wang Qishan, to sign an agreement reinstating the Beijing-New York “sister-city” relationship.

Recall that in 1989, then-Mayor Koch suspended the New York-Beijing sister city link as a protest against China’s crushing of pro-democracy demonstrators. Mayor Giuliani was a vocal supporter of the pro-democracy forces in China and hosted China’s political dissidents at Gracie Mansion. Fifteen years on, what exactly has China done to deserve such an affiliation with New York?

The Sister City program says one of its purposes is to “promote multinational cultural and commercial interaction respectful of individual differences and human rights.” Beijing doesn’t respect human rights at home, so why should New Yorkers grant legitimacy to one of the last totalitarian regimes outside the Arab world?

A Chinese political dissident, Tong Yi, who is now a New Yorker, spent two years in China’s “reform through labor” camps for advocating democratic change. “This is a very disappointing development,” Ms. Tong, a lawyer, told The New York Sun. “Why should City Hall send the message that things have improved so significantly in China?” Ms. Tong added that Mr. Giuliani’s stance backing democracy and reform in China was a vital and much-missed support.

Some had initially hoped that China’s new president, Hu Jintao, and premier, Wen Jiabao, would be less hard-line than Jiang Zemin. Instead, the new leaders have been arresting and imprisoning religious, political, Internet, and labor activists by the dozen. Chinese leaders threatened Taiwan’s democracy ahead of the elections. In Hong Kong, Beijing launched a Cultural Revolution-style “patriotism” campaign designed to frighten the public and isolate brave pro-democracy leaders ahead of September elections. The Chinese Communist leaders vetoed democratic reform indefinitely.

The sister-city relationship is symbolic, so why not select a worthy symbol? Last year, we suggested making Taipei our sister city, recognizing that Taiwan is the only Chinese democracy. This year, we’d add Hong Kong to the sisterhood to indicate our concern at Beijing’s grip on the throat of Hong Kong’s democracy activists, whose sin is to demand that Beijing make good on its promise to Britain and the world that a returned Hong Kong would have 50 years of “one country, two systems.” Mr. Bloomberg’s signing of the sister-city relationship with Beijing sends a decidedly different message — that elected leaders in this country do not care about Red China’s anti-democratic policies.