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While global commentators hail the unprecedented success of the Beijing Olympic Games, few have commented on the methods employed to promote urban development in China. This article develops a conceptual framework to unfold the Beijing Olympics and China's mega-event urbanization model, which feature 'playing games for leveraging land'. Literally, this informally translates to 'concept creation' and 'land and finance leverage paradigm'. Based on a detailed investigation of the way China has dealt with megaevents such as the Olympics and the Asian Games, this article begins with an analysis on the well-known Chinese 'land and leveraged finance' model. However, it goes a step further to reveal a much bigger picture and brings to light the deeper underlying logic behind China's 'mega-event urbanization model' as well as its legacy and consequence. It unfolds the intriguing relations between central and local governments; between functional/institutional systems (land, taxation and banking) in regard to territory and space; and between economic and political dynamics (local competition for both economic/GDP growth and individual political aspirations). This development model is unique to China and extraordinarily unconventional on a global scale which is unparalleled by any past experiences in other countries that have hosted the Olympic Games and other similar events. The ramifications of such ambitious and untested strategies could yield negative impacts on China's long-term development and harm the world economy in the global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More and more developing countries have become involved in the production processes of MNCs. although normally at the low end of a value-added chain. Subsequently, countries with the comparative advantage of low production Costs have become the leading recipients of FDI and their economic growth has been significantly driven by it. This paper attempts to investigate how a spatial change of FDI has impacted sot recent regional economic groupings in China, taking the Pan-Pearl River Delta regionalization as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]