International mega-sports events in Nanjing: China’s frugal games

Abstract

While Chinese cities were keen to extravagantly celebrate international mega-sports events before Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, they have been required to hold them on a frugal basis since then. This article reviews how Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province, turned the 2013 Asian Youth Games and the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics into ‘frugal’ events, and whether the events were still able to boost China’s international profile. It concludes that Chinese hosting cities will have to constantly carry out various cost-saving policies to ensure that the overall spending on any mega-sports event during the Xi era is under budget and is less than the costs of similar preceding events, as frugality may benefit China on the global stage.

Keywords:

• China
• mega-sports events
• Nanjing 2013 Asian Youth Games
• Nanjing 2014 Summer Youth Olympics
• frugality
• international profile

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Professor Brian Bridges for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.