Publication
This thesis focuses on Chongli, China's first Olympic mountain city, to investigate how the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games have catalyzed the rapid transformation of this mountainous region at the economic, infrastructural, and societal levels. Located 200 km from Beijing, Chongli's transformation lies at the intersection of mega-events, city-region development, and a new paradigm of urbanization in the former mountainous periphery, which also aligns with China's national campaigns of ecological civilization and rural revitalization. The thesis posits that Chongli's urbanization exemplifies a case of territorial development linking a peripheral region to a metropolis, largely shaped by state-led development policies at the city-region scale, initiated in the context of the Olympic Games. Using extended urbanization as the overarching analytical framework and drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between late 2021 and 2024, this research explores Chongli's urbanization through three key dimensions. First, from a political-economic perspective, it examines the institutional, financial, and political configurations underpinning mountain development triggered by the Winter Olympics, that said, the territorial business model of Chongli. Second, by focusing on the rapid expansion and evolution of Chongli's ski resorts, the analysis conceptualizes these resorts as pivotal social infrastructure in the mountains, serving both as consumption enclaves for urbanites and as essential livelihood resources for local communities. Third, it investigates how the Olympic momentum has extended into rural spaces through political mandates, reconfiguring local economic and social networks and affecting residents' livelihoods and lifestyles. Based on these contextualized analyses, this thesis advances the key argument that diverse spatial practices, including Olympics-related construction projects, the expansion of ski resorts, and the restructuring of rural spaces, collectively exemplify a dominant discourse of state developmental urbanism, a concept introduced in this thesis to characterize the role of the state in shaping mountain urbanization through development and urban planning policies. These transformations are fundamentally driven by the production of mountain infrastructures across different spatial contexts, which underpin the reconfiguration of social connectivity at the frontier of state developmental urbanism. By linking Chongli's Olympic-oriented trajectory to the broader dynamics of pervasive state-led urbanization, this research seeks to reopen critical debates on the role of state developmentalism in shaping contemporary urban and regional transformations in China and beyond.