Urbanization Paradigm Shift in China’s Mountain Areas Driven by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics: Financialized Ecological Civilization and Cultural Consumption

This presentation aims to explore the paradoxical interrelationships between land financialization and ecological civilization, using a Chinese case of mountain urbanization driven by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Chongli, which is only 200 kilometers away from Beijing, has long been a national-level poverty-stricken mountain area. Since Chongli played a role as a military safeguard and ecological barrier to the capital city, its industrial development was limited for years. However, after it was awarded the right to co-host the Winter Olympics in 2015, the transformation of mountain areas was drastically boosted, accompanied by a new business model featuring mountain leisure and cultural consumption. The winter sports economy serves as a new regional growth engine, based on related real estate development and other forms of leisure and heritage tourism. Meanwhile, there has been a spatial re-scaling between the former mountain peripheries and the capital, as the Olympics triggered infrastructure and transportation upgrades and increased mobility to attract both financial resources and consumers. We argue that this reflects an extended urbanization paradigm shift in the mountains, in which mountain land financialization goes along with the creation of new consumption places where leisure and consumption activities serve as a new spatial fix at the scale of the city-region of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. In this new paradigm, China's ecological civilization strategy is part of state entrepreneurialism that seeks more quality-oriented development and urbanization of mountain areas.