Growing dominance and soft power enhancement: Exploring Chinese cities' continual efforts to promote international sports events from a city network perspective.

ABSTRACT: While studies on World City Networks (WCNs) based on International Sports Events (ISEs) have revealed a nonwesternization evolutionary trend, few studies have focused on high-level ISEs' long-term spillover effects on promoting nonwestern host countries. This paper aims to fill these gaps by exploring the external connections of Chinese cities in each Olympic Games since 2008 deploying social network analysis and community detection methods. The results show that gateway events, such as the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games and the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, rather than gateway cities, play essential roles in promoting Chinese cities' status in sports diffusion. Specifically, after the successful hosting of Olympic games, international sports federations (ISFs) witnessed Chinese cities' ab

SUBMITTER: Ou Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11578504 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature