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

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' ability to organize ISEs; consequently, ISFs would try to select Chinese host cities considering China's rapid development and the relatively lower popularity of certain sports domestically. Additionally, as ISEs offer significant opportunities for city marketing, many Chinese cities have incorporated hosting ISEs as important urban development strategies. The promotion of the "events globalization" strategy by ISFs and the attraction measures taken by Chinese city governments for ISEs have ultimately led to a continuous increase in the number of Chinese cities and their direct external connections in ISE-based WCNs. This finding fully reveals the long-term spillover effect of high-level ISEs on promoting cities in nonwestern host countries. This further indicates that the nonwesternization trend in ISE-based WCNs may be because an increasing number of high-level ISEs, such as the Olympics and the World Cups, were held in nonwestern countries.