Peking Duck as a museum spectacle: staging local heritage for Olympic tourism

In 1991, Beijing began a campaign of urban renewal that emphasized rapid economic growth, in part through the transformation of its older districts from overcrowded hutong neighborhoods into commercial centers (Gaubatz, 1999).1 The city’s leaders decided early on that one measure of success for this urban facelift would be the opportunity to host the Olympic Summer Games. After a failed attempt to win the bid in 1993, the city

redoubled its efforts until ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’ (xin Beijing, xin Aoyun) finally became a reality in 2008.