‘Glittering Guangzhou’: The 2010 Asian Games – Local Rivalries, National Motives, Geopolitical Gestures

The Guangzhou Asian Games of 2010 was the deliberate outcome of an intense regional rivalry, a careful national balancing act and a geopolitical marketing momentum embedded in a provincial and civil reconstruction that mirrored a wider national reconstruction: Guangdong and Guangzhou – ‘the city’, the Games City and Chinese performances were statements about the controlled advance of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ to a regained hegemonic status in the western Pacific. This is a verbal and visual depiction of the cosmopolitanism and confidence of the New China: word and picture meshed to demonstrate vividly the modern ascendancy of the ‘Middle Kingdom’.