Hosting the Winter Olympics costs China billions of dollars, a volume of spending that has made the event less attractive to many cities around the world in recent years. More and more countries have concluded that the games do not deserve to be hosted because of the huge bill, and the less-than-hoped-for benefits of tourists.
But China views the games with different accounts, according to a report in the New York Times.
Beijing has long relied on large investments in railroads, highways and other infrastructure to create millions of jobs for its citizens and reduce transportation costs.
With the 2022 Olympics, it also hopes to foster a lasting interest in skiing, curling, ice hockey and other winter sports that could boost consumer spending, especially in the cold and economically struggling northeast.
Perhaps most important for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the Olympics are an opportunity to show the world his country's unity and confidence in his leadership.
"For China's international image and prestige, as the Chinese say, nothing is considered too expensive,"said Jean-Pierre Capstan, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist University.
However, with the Chinese economy already slowing, the lackluster outlook for global growth, as well as fears that the Omicron mutant could lead to further closures and strangle global supply chains, Beijing has been wary of escalating costs.
Almost every Olympic Games in recent years have provoked disputes about cost overruns. A study at the University of Oxford found that the running costs of the Olympic Games held since 1960 have averaged nearly three times what the host cities originally cost.
The city of Sochi in Russia, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, spent more than.50 billion, more than half of which was invested on infrastructure.
When Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008, it said it spent 6 6.8 billion, but that doesn't include the tens of billions more it used to build roads, stadiums, subway lines and an airport terminal.
This time, China has set a budget of about.3 billion, a figure that includes building venues for the competition and does not include projects such as a billion-dollar high-speed rail line and a 5 billion highway.
And the pandemic makes games more expensive. The bill for the Tokyo Olympics last summer included 2 2.8 billion in coronavirus prevention costs alone.
China's assertiveness over the pandemic has dashed hopes that the games will attract tourists, and organizers said last fall they would not sell tickets to foreign spectators. Then they announced last month that most Chinese residents would not be able to go either, prompting hotel managers in Beijing at the last minute to drastically cut February's high room prices.
Officials said the shortage of spectators meant fewer staff were needed at the games.
The organizing committee said China also saved money by canceling reception ceremonies for foreign visitors and shortening the duration of the torch relay to just three days.
Beijing has also been able to reuse stadiums, a giant media center and other facilities built for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
According to Oxford University researchers, the operating budget of the games in China, at 3.1 billion dollars, is comparable to the average cost of hosting the previous Winter Olympics.
But it is difficult to assess which part of the costs of coronavirus prevention is included in the budget, as the government has pressured companies to bear more of the costs of hosting the games.
In Zhangjiakou, an area near Beijing where some competitions are held, Chinese authorities temporarily seized the Malaysian-owned Genting Secret Garden ski resort.
The resort has expanded its capacity to 3,800 rooms and holiday apartments, up from just 380 before China won the Olympics.
Lim Chi-wah, the resort's founder and co-owner, said in an interview that he had not been told how much the government would reimburse him for using the resort for most of the winter season, but that he was "confident that would be fair."
Before Beijing won the 2022 Olympics, the government began spending 8.4 billion dollars on a high-speed rail line that would carry travelers from Beijing to Inner Mongolia at speeds of up to 217 miles per hour.
After winning the Olympic Games, Beijing added a billion dollars to the project to build an additional strip to the Taizicheng mountains.
Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College who has published three books on the economics of the Olympics, said: "the Chinese don't count any of that - they say they would have built it anyway. The question arises whether this is true".
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