Growing worries on visa-delays

Image via WikipediaChina has been tightening its visa-issuing regime ahead of the Olympic Games this summer in Beijing, although the consequences are not yet clear. For people who are having an official job with a company in China, there seems to be no problem, but for people on a set of other visas, things have changed.
How they have changed is not yet clear, but I have seen two instances of people who were planning to go to China for business, but had to cancel because of undefined visa problems. (They dealt through travel agencies, and were not clear themselves what the problem could have been.)
The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf wrote yesterday that the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands had announced that to obtain a tourist or similar temporary visas, applicants would have to submit also a travel iternery, including booking for airplanes and hotels. That would suggest that the procedure would at least take substantially more time and that could have been a problem with visa applications that were already in the procedure when the rules changed. I have checked their website, but did not see any recent added information.