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Beijing Winter Olympics 2022
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Apartment blocks and office buildings are seen in Beijing as the city starts to prepare for the Winter Olympics in 2022. Photo: Reuters

New | Winter Olympics gives Beijing’s neighbouring region an opportunity to play catch-up

Time for Chinese capital to propel development in neighbouring cities

The 2022 Winter Olympics will give China a chance to demonstrate what it can achieve to make the world’s second-largest economy greener and more balanced, economists and officials said.

Beijing won the bid last month and it will stage the event together with Zhangjiakou city, a popular ski destination in neighbouring Hebei province.

“It’s now time for Beijing to help propel development in its surrounding region,” said Ma Qingbin, a senior researcher at the China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, a top government think tank. “The key is to let the market play a bigger role.”

The government said 65 per cent of the US$1.51 billion budget for stadiums and other sports facilities would be financed by private investors.

To know how imbalanced the Chinese economy is now, one does not need to go too far beyond its capital. Zhangjiakou, about 200 kilometres’ drive northwest, had gross domestic product of 30,729 yuan per capita last year, less than a third of the level in Beijing.

The top leaders launched a blueprint earlier this year to remove some of the non-crucial functions out of the jammed capital as part of a plan to give others in its surrounding area an opportunity and possibly more fiscal support to develop so that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region will form another cluster of developed cities, such as those in the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas, with more balanced growth.

Most of the new sports facilities for the Winter Olympics will be built in Zhangjiakou and Beijing’s suburban district of Yanqing. The event is also expected to speed up investment in infrastructure such as roads, highways and high-speed rails so that those poor areas with rich natural resources can be better accessed by visitors from outside.

Chen Jian, the head of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Winter Olympics Research Centre, told a forum one day after the bidding result was announced that Zhangjiakou would be able to grow its economy more than 10 per cent in the next seven years, up from last year’s 5.2 per cent, so that its GDP per capita would hit the national average level when the Games were staged in 2022.

“The key is to have sustainable development,” Chen said, hoping the ecological environment in Zhangjiakou would remain at the top among the northern region amid such fast growth.

Ma said growth would naturally be led by housing inflation – home prices have already started to surge in the city – and the answer to sustainable development relied on the local government’s ability to make sure housing remained affordable to local residents or build more government-subsidised affordable homes.

To achieve that, Zhanjiakou must develop industries related to ski and other sports, such as the manufacturing and maintenance of sports facilities and medical care for athletes, he said.

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