Post-industrial nightmare or successful reconversion?

After the coronation of the Chinese idol Eileen Gu in skiing, the springboard 60 meters above the ground installed in a former Beijing steelworks will resume service for snowboarding events from Monday.

The platform stands on the site of the Shougang steelworks, in the west of the Chinese capital, which, in their heyday, employed more than 200,000 workers.

Between chimneys and cooling towers, the decor is unexpected for a competition that one would rather expect to see in a landscape of snow-capped mountains.

At its zenith, the gigantic metallurgical installation, built from 1919, had a production capacity of more than 10 million tonnes of steel per year, according to the New China agency.

The big air ski site of the Beijing Olympics is reflected in the glasses of a spectator, February 9, 2022 Manan VATSYAYANA AFP / Archives

Under Mao Tse-tung, the founder of the communist regime (1949-76), the factory had become a showcase for the modernization of the country... before being perceived more recently as an ecological disaster.

Bars, hotels and cafes

The Shougang chimneys expelled 9,000 tons of pollution into the skies of Beijing every year, plunging the Shijingshan district where they are located in a noxious fog.

"In summer, the inhabitants no longer dared to walk in the evening to refresh themselves, nor eat outside, even less hang clothes on the window: in one night, the white linen became black", declared in 2011 a former steelworker, Lu Zengzhi, at New China.

Swedish Jesper Tjader during the big air ski final on February 9, 2022 at the Beijing Olympics Gabriel BOUYS AFP / Archives

As the 2008 Summer Olympics approached, the government decided to gradually close the factory.

The very last metal cables will come out of the chains at the end of 2010.

But instead of destroying everything, the authorities chose to keep the original setting, gradually transformed into a trendy district with art galleries, bars, cafes, restaurants, gardens, hotels and offices... including that of the organizers of the Olympic Games. -2022.

The disused factory also includes an ice hockey stadium.

"Dystopian"

But the highlight of the new Shougang is obviously the platform intended for big air, inaugurated in 2019. Skiers and snowboarders can set off to perform acrobatic tricks in full flight from the springboard, presented as the only one in the world with a permanent vocation.

The sudden appearance of this industrial wasteland on the images of the Olympic Games has been variously commented on internationally.

Chinese Eileen Gu during big air skiing qualifications, February 7, 2022 at the Beijing Olympics Manan VATSYAYANA AFP / Archives

Sometimes praised for its "cool" or "amazing" side, the site also shocked many foreign Internet users, who saw it as a "scary" installation or, wrongly, "a nuclear power plant" because of its cooling towers .

In the United States, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a notorious opponent of Beijing, felt that "China could not have found an even more dystopian place for the Olympics".

But the places have also been rewarded for their successful conversion: Shougang won a prize in 2018 from the International Society of City and Regional Planners, an association of town planners based in the Netherlands.

© 2022 AFP