After decades of hardship and disasters, the China of the 1970s was, to quote Chairman Mao, “poor and blank”. The nation’s per-capita output of metals was among the lowest in the world. There were the Shenyang Copper and Fushun Aluminium Smelters left behind by the Soviet Union and Japan respectively, and not much else besides. But finally the oriental“sleeping dragon” woke up and took flight. After Deng Xiaoping introduced the policies of “Reform and Opening-Up” at the end of the 1970s, China experienced continuous rapid economic growth. Her production and consumption of metals overtook those of Europe and America, to occupy the number one spot in the new millennium.