For the past few weeks, the capital’s foreign community has been hunkered down in bars, nervously peeling the labels off its bottles of Qingdao in collective anxiety over China’s new visa regulations. Various reports, most out of Hong Kong (where the majority of the Middle Kingdom’s long-stay guests go to re-up on visas), indicate the government has essentially decided to stop issuing anything but tourist visas from now until October. Rumors have also been circulating that foreign students and political refugees will be forced to leave–a rumor that appears to have been confirmed by Monsters and Critics yesterday. Finally, separate sources with knowledge of China’s visa “graymarket” recently told me the government has decided to eliminate all visas of any kind for people from Africa and the Middle East for the duration of the Olympics.

The Foreign Ministry’s responses to questions about visas have done little to clarify the situation. In an AP report last week, spokeswoman Jiang Yu denied any change in policy, saying only that “China’s visa policy is formulated according to China’s laws and regulations.” But in the Monsters and Critics article she pulls a flip-flop worthy of any Washington politician, confirming the change in policy while insisting (rather incredibly) that it “will have no influence on normal business activities in China.”

The foreign business community in Hong Kong apparently disagrees.

So why, on the eve of its own $40 billion debutante ball, has the Chinese government decided to make such drastic changes to its guest list?

The easy answer, of course, is the T word. The last thing Beijing wants, after the various Olympic torch relay debacles in London and Paris (and to a lesser extent San Francisco), is for a bunch of resident foreigners to show up at the opening ceremonies carrying pro-Dalai Lama clique banners and talking to international media about China’s problems from a foundation of personal experience. But while that may explain kicking Beijing’s foreign students to the curb, it doesn’t explain the other changes. Africa, after all, is the only continent so far to deliver on the unequivocal rapture Beijing claimed would welcome the Olympic torch world wide.

On the other hand, Africa is also the source of Beijing’s drug epidemic–at least in the eyes of Beijing police, who made headlines last year in an indelicate round-up of dark-skinned revelers in the city’s Sanlitun drinking district. And the Middle East? Well, there’s the terrorism threat.

The businessmen are a tougher call. It’s true, many foreign businessmen get up to no good in their off-hours–visiting prostitutes and whatnot. But that hardly seems reason to ban them altogether. They bring in an awful lot of investment, after all. Most likely, they are simply a casualty of the visa structure. Obtainable through a variety of channels (some more legal than others), multiple-entry business visas are the documentation of choice for a wide variety of foreigners in China, and not all of them are here to make China rich.

In light of all this, the question in my mind isn’t why is China doing this, but why not? Ever since rumors of the visa changes emerged, the more self-righteous in Beijing’s ex-pat community have been stomping around in fits of baffled incredulity. At a time when the world is vilifying China, their reasoning goes, how can the government afford to alienate us? We who understand and tolerate it’s flaws? The most likely answer seems to be because it can. Jilted foreigners may throw a few fits. They may pen a handful of frothing anti-China blog posts from a cut-rate long-stay hotel in Hanoi or Thailand. But come October, they’ll be back in the visa queue in Hong Kong, four passport-sized photos and handful of left-over renminbi in hand, anxious to reclaim their front-row seats for what will still be the 21st century’s greatest show.

And all those indignant businessmen? Jiang Yu may have been downplaying the negative effects of the new visa policy on business in China, but not by much. Foreign Direct Investment in China was $82 billion in 2007 alone, according the US-China business council. Something tells me the managers of that cash will find a way to get over the Olympics snub.

In the meantime, leaders in Beijing can go a long way to satisfying those raving nationalists who would sooner boycott their own Olympics than see China once again humiliated on an international stage–a group arguably more of a threat to the Communist Party than any quantity of wounded expatriates.

One has to wonder if this (or this or this) is what protesters in France, the UK and the US had in mind.

Reading Austin’s post puts me in mind of a topic I meant to mention here before I got sucked into my thesis vortex: the new “Impossible is Nothing” advertising campaign Adidas just launched in China and its excruciatingly vivid illustration of the kind of heat Chinese athletes face as the big dance approaches.

I wouldn’t ordinarily devote space on this blog to advertising, particularly when it comes from a company that gets plenty of exposure on its own. Every so often, however, one has to suck it up and recognize that a marketing firm (in this case, TWBA) has done something truly noteworthy.

What’s noteworthy about the Adidas campaign, which launched late last year, is its imagery: Color shots of various Chinese athletes doing their thing with the help of–sometimes on top of–millions of their compatriots, the latter strikingly sketched in black-and-white. According to the Shanghaiist, the campaign took six months to put together. In an earlier post on the TIME China Blog, Austin mentioned seeing immense crowds on Wangfujing, Beijing’s tawdry shopping street equivalent of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, queuing up in icy weather last month for a chance to have their photos inserted into post-card versions of the ad. The campaign has attracted massive, largely adoring, attention in the PR world. The Shanghaiist and Austin also both appear to have been inspired by it.

I’ll admit, the ads are breathtaking. Transcendent even. Like Apple’s legendary ad for the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl. But there is also something undeniably disturbing about them, particularly in the spot (see above) featuring Olympic champion diver Hu Jia, in which people have replaced both the diving platform and the water. [Click here to see it full-size. I mean it. Click.]

The image reminds me of a painting I once saw in a Confucian temple in Jilin that depicted a precarious human pyramid composed of thousands of Imperial exam candidates climbing on top of each other in a bid to reach the highest official position. The Adidas ad’s message for Chinese people may be unity rather than competition, but it’s no less frightening for that reason.

The socio-political and nationalist implications of the campaign are deep and textured, and I’m sure someone with better deconstructionist chops than myself will eventually have a go at those. In the meantime, I worry what the ads mean for the poor individuals at the center of them. I’m sure there isn’t a Chinese Olympic athlete alive who hasn’t spent hours alone in the dark worrying about how the country’s billion-plus will react if they fail to meet expectations. But now the nightmare is rendered for them in vivid detail and broadcast everywhere–on billboards, on their friends’ TV sets, in the subways. Sure, the people in the ads are all hopping around in exuberant anticipation of victory, but how difficult it is to imagine that same writing mass shouting in the rage of defeat?

Athletes of that caliber probably thrive on pressure in ways mortal people don’t. Liu Xiang, at least, claims to revel in it. But certainly there must be a limit beyond which that pressure becomes counter-productive, when athletes get overloaded with it, like car engines flooded with too much gas.

Of course, in a sense, that’s precisely what makes the ads so brilliant. Whether Hu Jia wins and sends the crowd into mass hysteria or loses and gets torn apart, the message is the same: There’s no way you can miss this.

For my money, the still images have the greatest impact, but here’s the video version for those of you who want to see it: