Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition
The former site of the "West Ten Silos" in Shougang Park became the seat of the Organizing Committee of the Winter Olympic Games. People Pictures
Spectators watched a model of the National Alpine Ski Center and the National Bobsleigh Center in the Yanqing Area of the Beijing Winter Olympics at the Winter Expo held in Shougang Park. Photo by Chen Xiaogen
In the Shougang Industrial Park, there is a striking sign - "Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games Organizing Committee". The brick red characters condense the traces of oxidized years, and under the large characters is a piece of natural steel plate, and the rust on the steel plate is deep and shallow, which looks like a unique xishan travel map from a distance, indicating the history and today of Shougang.
The overall relocation of Shougang has been 11 years ago. Shougang people are accustomed to using two words to condense the great changes in the past hundred years - "from mountains to sea" and "from fire to ice". "From the mountains to the sea" refers to Shougang's caofeidian from the Yanshan Mountains to the shores of the Bohai Sea; "from fire to ice" refers to shougang's transformation from a hot steelmaking ground to a winter Olympic venue with ice and snow melting.
What kind of appearance does an enterprise appear in a city for more than a hundred years?
"Since it is the first, we must take the lead"
Shougang's predecessor was the Shijingshan IronWorks of the Longyan Iron Ore Company established in 1919.
After the founding of new China, in the old iron factory that had been abandoned for more than 30 years, the workers built a new steel factory with their hands and feet. In 1950, a dilapidated blast furnace was put on the renovation agenda. Dozens of shougang workers have not returned home for 33 consecutive days, and the 24-hour continuous shaft rotation has made the two main indicators of the blast furnace reach the first in the world: the utilization coefficient exceeded 2.5, surpassing the steel mills in the Soviet Union at that time; the focal ratio dropped to 336 kilograms, lower than the same level of steel companies in Japan.
No. 2 blast furnace transformation, No. 345 blast furnace, primary rolling mill, cold drawing plant, welded steel pipe factory... One by one, the factories that started construction turned the wilderness and vegetable fields outside the Shougang factory area into brand-new factories.
With the gradual expansion of the Shougang plant area, the line from the factory area to the Downtown Area of Beijing is also gradually prosperous. In the 1960s, when Beijing built the first subway in New China, the entire Shijingshan area was still rural, and it was only because Shougang was located in the western suburbs that it added a station to the subway that needed to lead to the Shougang family area.
On June 8, 1970, when receiving representatives of key steel enterprises in the country, Premier Zhou Enlai said to the representatives of Shougang: "Shougang is a steel mill in the capital, and since it is the first, it must take the lead!"
For a long time, Shougang people have followed this sentence to understand and undertake their mission in Beijing. In those days when Beijing's biggest goal was to build a modern industrial base, the proportion of Beijing's secondary industry increased from 44.1% in 1954 to 71% in 1980, and Shougang's rapid progress was the largest "ballast stone".
Industrial reform looks at Shougang
1994 was the highlight of Shougang's history. This year, Shougang's steel production expanded from 1.79 million tons in 1978 to more than 8 million tons, ranking first in the country. The profit tax paid by one shougang enterprise reached 23% of the tax revenue of Beijing.
It all started with the reforms of 1979.
In 1979, Shougang became one of the eight pilot units announced by the State Council to expand the experiment of enterprise autonomy. Shougang put forward the contracting plan of "wrapping up the base number, ensuring the surrender, overtaking all the packages, and taking the burden of the harvest" - retaining profits under the premise of increasing the profit tax by 7% every year. The "contract system" brought Shougang a leapfrog development: by 1988, Shougang's ore output was 19.75 million tons, pig iron output was 3.36 million tons, steel output was 3.57 million tons, and finished steel output was 3.14 million tons, which were 175.9%, 137%, 199.4% and 268.4% in 1978, respectively.
Not only that, Shougang has also carried out a series of breakthrough measures such as cross-industry, cross-regional, cross-ownership and transnational operation. As a result, the whole country has the saying that "agricultural reform looks at Fengyang, and industrial reform looks at Shougang".
Shougang uses 60% of the profits left in the enterprise to expand reproduction, 20% for employee welfare, and 20% as wage bonuses. As a result, the surge is not only Shougang's output, but also the income and welfare of workers. Shougang's "contracting system" has been implemented for 15 years, and the wages and benefits of employees have continued to rise for 15 years at an average annual rate of 16%.
Environmental relocation "from mountain to sea"
In the 21st century, as people pay more and more attention to environmental pollution, Shougang is no longer the darling of Beijing. Although since 1995, Shougang has invested nearly 200 million yuan in environmental protection every year, desulfurization, dephenolization, filtration... All environmentally friendly equipment is used at great length in the world. The situation of smoke and dust in the factory area has been alleviated, and the workers can work in front of the steel furnace for a day to make their faces not dirty, and the maximum smoke emitted can reach more than 98% of the water vapor.
However, the steel industry is, after all, a major polluter of energy consumption.
The successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games has put forward higher requirements for environmental protection. In a sense, it is a big step forward in the decision to relocate Shougang. Finally, in February 2005, the State Council officially approved the decision to reduce Shougang's production year by year, and at the same time relocate and leave Beijing.
In the past few decades, he has personally established so many "national firsts" and have to tear it down with his own hands, which is to use a knife in his own heart socket. Even if feelings aside, moving the 8 million tons of extraordinarily large steel enterprises east 250 kilometers is an unprecedented plan in China's industrialization process.
But Shougang people once again started from scratch.
More than 200 kilometers away from the capital, the small island of Caofeidian in Hebei Province soon rose to a new steel city. A year later, the first phase of the shougang new site project, 11.95 square kilometers of all blown fill. In 3 years, the staggered modern factories, automated production equipment, garden-style factories, clusters of new dormitories, restaurants and other living facilities are readily available, and the convenient transportation of two-way four-lane roads has been completed.
On the beach, Shougang people have achieved a second entrepreneurship and completed the upgrading of products. From the wide and thick plates of shipbuilding, to the plates for automobiles, the plates for home appliance shells, and then to the tin-plated plates for small beverage cans, from oil and gas pipelines to electronic devices, 31 steel grades and more than 280 grades of products all belong to high-precision categories. The "Long March 5" and "Long March No. 7" carrier rocket engines and the National Day military parade vehicles were all made of Shougang steel.
At the end of 2010, Shougang's last blast furnace in Beijing was discontinued. On the day of the suspension of production, the last furnace of molten iron slipped through the lifting beam, and when it was poured into the storage tank, the steel flowers splashed and were as gorgeous as fireworks. The media and workers on site kept pressing the shutter. In fact, contemporary steel smelting has long been completely free of the fiery scene of steel splashing, in order to let everyone better feel the brilliance of this last furnace of steel, Shougang engineers specially in the computer manually changed several data, creating a beautiful visual effect for everyone to commemorate.
"From fire to ice" achieves a beautiful leap
After the suspension of production, Shougang is no longer hot.
With the expansion of Beijing's urban area, Shougang has long since ceased to be remote. Located on the west extension of Chang'an Avenue, the traffic is in all directions, and the living facilities are readily available. Under the rising house prices, the factory area totaling 8.63 square kilometers is definitely a good deal if it is used to develop real estate, but this is the first plan that Shougang has denied.
Shougang people have been watching over this factory area that has been discontinued like a caretaker eyeball. In 2006, Shougang's Capital Investment Company, together with the team of Liu Boying of Tsinghua University, conducted a comprehensive investigation of the current situation, history, culture, art, technology, economy and other aspects of existing buildings and structures, and identified 36 compulsory reservations, 42 recommended reservations and 124 important industrial resources.
On July 31, 2015, Thomas Bach announced that the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics would be Beijing, and a world-rare renovation project began. In the past few years, Shougang Park has built itself into a new landmark for the revitalization of the capital city in the new era.
The current offices of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committees are six converted silos that used to store and transport blast furnace ironmaking raw materials. The appearance of the silo is uniform to maintain the true color of the concrete industrial building, clean and fresh. Circular, square and rectangular windows of varying sizes and staggered are cut out of the walls of the barrels, and the silos are connected by sightseeing elevators. The belt corridor leading to the air through the large floor-to-ceiling windows of the main office building has been maximally preserved in the frame and repainted with the shougang blue of the production period. Not far away, the little train lay quietly on the tracks. To the south of the Shougang office area of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee, Xiuchi, which was originally used as a cooling pool for drying water, is sparkling, and flocks of fat koi are swimming around in the water. Xiuchi was originally 5 meters deep, but after the transformation, it was compressed to 1.2 meters, and the deep space was transformed into an underground garage and an underwater art exhibition hall, displaying shougang's glorious century-old factory history.
Veneer big jumping platform venue, refined coal workshop, No. 1 blast furnace... Driverless electric vehicles shuttle through the park, bringing a bit of sci-fi to the masculine steel remnants.
In June 2018, the signing ceremony of the official urban renewal service partner of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games was held in the office area of the Beijing Winter Olympic Organizing Committee of Shougang Park. On this day, Shougang made the list of the highest sponsors of the Olympic Games appear for the first time in the new category of "urban renewal service providers" with its own achievements.
Shougang, which once brought glory and wealth to Beijing, has always been closely connected to Beijing through several changes. The fiery steel production scene may not be recovered, but the strength that comes from the collective and the years condensed in time cannot be dissolved by time.