The Construction of Beijing as an Olympic City

Many cities offer to provide high-quality infrastructure for the Olympic Games stadiums, housing, transportation, and media facilities. The International Olympic Committee has no firm criteria for selecting between qualified cities that bid to host the Olympics. During the contest to host the 2008 Games, Beijing distinguished their bid from other candidatures by presenting arguments that went far beyond organizational capacity. This did not only win them the right to host the Olympic Games, but also served to increase the legitimacy of the IOC and reinforce the strongly modernist ideologies of the Chinese government and the Olympic Movement. This paper analyses how Beijing set their bid apart, and discusses the conditions under which Chinese journalists produced material about the Olympic bid for official English-language media.

Autorentext

Heidi Østbø Haugen es investigadora en el Departamento de Sociología y Geografía Humana de la Universidad de Oslo. Su investigación actual se centra en las relaciones chino-africanas. Anteriormente, trabajó para el Ministerio de Educación e Investigación de Noruega y el Programa Mundial de Alimentos en África Occidental.