Earthquakes, giant pandas and the Olympic Games: China can’t seem to escape the news. Most of this news isn’t making China any more popular, either.

According to USA Today, national security agencies are warning business and federal officials that electronics taken to the Beijing Olympics are likely to be hacked by Chinese agents interested in U.S. security, political and business data.

“There is a high likelihood – virtually 100 percent – that if an individual is of security, political or business interest to Chinese . security services or high technology industries, their electronics can and will be tampered with or penetrated,” Larry Wortzel, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told USA Today.

This, combined with news out of Washington regarding possible Chinese hacking attempts against computers of members of Congress – most notably members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – sheds yet more light on the dark spectre that is communist China.

If the Chinese were looking to “clean up their image,” as it were, flagrantly spying on the rest of the world’s populations really seems like a rather poor way of doing so. In a year that was to mark China’s showcase to the world at the Beijing Olympic Games, they have managed only to stumble from one public relations disaster to another: first Tibet, and now this.

Perhaps, nearly 20 years after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, this chain of events – highlighted by the glaring spotlight of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad – will remind people of what China and communism really are: a brute machine interested only in the unwavering maintenance of its own power, under the guise of the “people” and “progressive socialism.”

More worrisome than that, however, is the relative impunity with which the People’s Republic has been able to go about this.

How much leverage can our government possibly hope to exert on the Chinese, whose central bank now holds nearly one-fifth of our national debt?

If repression, espionage, privacy invasion and police state-style tactics aren’t enough to elicit boycotts from some other countries around the world, who knows what is. Hopefully, however, the world will reawaken to the true nature and intent of the Chinese government – and comprehend just how little progress has actually been made since that fateful June day 19 years ago.