China's Nickel Foundry:
Vice Premier Fang Yi
and Jinchuan

The metal that defines a nation's industry

Nickel is the quiet backbone of the modern industrial world. It hardens stainless steel, gives aerospace superalloys their strength at extreme temperatures, and today anchors the cathodes of the batteries powering the energy transition. A country's ability to supply its own nickel is, in a real sense, a measure of its industrial sovereignty.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the People's Republic of China entered this arena at a disadvantage. It was widely regarded as a "nickel-poor" nation, dependent on outside supply at a time when access to the metal was tightly restricted. Securing a domestic source was not merely an economic ambition — it was a foundation stone for heavy industry and national defense. The story of how that gap was closed begins not in a boardroom or a laboratory, but on the wind-scoured gravel of the Gobi Desert.

A green stone in the Gobi

The northwest Gobi of 1958 was a place of high winds, bitter cold and near-total desolation — a landscape of drifting stones and ice. In June of that year, the 145th Team of the Northwest Coalfield Geological Exploration Bureau was conducting radioactive surveys near Baiji Azui, at the foot of Heihu ("Black Tiger") Mountain, in the Hexi Corridor.

There, geologists Tang Dongfu and Guo Chunshan noticed a cluster of stones coated in a vivid green oxide. They recognized it as malachite — 孔雀石, the "peacock stone" — a classic surface signature of copper. Samples were sent for analysis. When engineer Chen Xin ran the chemistry, the results carried a far larger promise than copper alone: the ore graded roughly 0.9% nickel alongside 16.05% copper. A copper prospect had revealed itself to be a nickel discovery of national consequence.

The peacock stone. Malachite — a copper carbonate hydroxide — weathers bright green at the surface and has guided prospectors to buried metal for millennia. A green-stained sample of it opened the Jinchuan deposit in 1958.

That single specimen has since been described as the "atomic bomb of Chinese industrial geology": it overturned the assumption of a nickel-poor China and set in motion the transformation of an empty stretch of desert into a metallurgical city. Within a year, geological exploration had given way to organized industry.

"From a single stone in the ice, a nation set out to forge its own supply of the metal that hardens steel and lifts aircraft." On the 1958 discovery at Heihu Mountain

Building the Yongchang mine from bare ground

The early 1960s called for a rapid build-up of organizational capacity to turn geological promise into working self-sufficiency. Following the first formal reserve report, the Ministry of Metallurgy established the Yongchang Nickel Mine in June 1959. In its first years the work was done largely by hand — steel chisels and iron hammers against hard rock — as the complex assembled China's first domestic production lines for nickel.

The milestones arrived quickly. By 1964 the facility produced 2,041 tons of high-grade matte and its first 22.43 tons of electrolytic nickel. In 1965 it went further, refining platinum-group metals and widening the nation's strategic resource base. The "First Phase Project," completed in 1966, was an integrated 采–选–冶 complex — mining, ore dressing and smelting under one program — designed and built with domestic equipment and expertise. It was a landmark in industrial self-reliance.

Yongchang · Jinchang · Gansu. The Hexi Corridor around the Longshou Mountain, where a village at the foot of the range grew into the city known as China's "Nickel Capital."

Vice Premier Fang Yi and the "Eight Journeys"

Fang Yi · 方毅 · 1916–1997. Vice Premier of China and President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the statesman-scientist who made eight working journeys to Jinchuan.

Fang Yi · 方毅

Statesman · Scientist-administrator

Born26 February 1916 — Xiamen, Fujian

Died17 October 1997 — Beijing

RolesVice Premier of China (1978–1982); President, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1979–1981); Director, State Science & Technology Commission (1978–1985)

LanguagesChinese, English, German, Japanese, Russian

1979Accompanied Deng Xiaoping to the United States; led a delegation to American technology centers including Georgia Tech, the Texas Medical Center and a Lockheed plant.

If the discovery belonged to the geologists, the scaling belonged in large part to Fang Yi — the figure often called the project's "behind-the-scenes hero." As head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he approached Jinchuan not as a distant administrator but as a technical orchestrator, and he envisioned it as one of the "Three Major National Mineral Resource Bases" for the comprehensive use of complex ores.

Between 1978 and 1986 he made what became known as his "Eight Descents to Jinchuan" — eight working journeys to the site itself. His method was a model of 科技联合攻关 ("technological joint attack"): he convened more than fifty research units and hundreds of experts from the Academy and from industry, weaving metallurgy, chemistry and mining engineering into a single interdisciplinary campaign. That collaborative blueprint became a template for China's later industrial rise.

"He treated the challenge not as a matter of paperwork, but as a problem of science to be solved by bringing the best minds to the ore." On Fang Yi's method of joint technical attack

The results were measurable. Under the framework of the "Three Major Steps," nickel output climbed year over year in the mid-1980s. Fang Yi's global outlook reinforced the effort: after touring American aerospace and technology sites in 1979, he became convinced that high-performance nickel and cobalt alloys were the essential currency of modern aerospace — and he pressed for Jinchuan to master them.

Fang Yi at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 1979. Leading a science-and-technology delegation during the historic opening to the West, he studied the alloys and methods he believed China would need to master.

January 1979. Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping is welcomed to Washington; Fang Yi traveled with the delegation before branching off to American research centers. The opening set the stage for a decade of technological benchmarking.

The Second Mine Area and the fire of the furnace

The modern scale of Jinchuan rests on a decision to drill deeper. In the exploration of the "Second Mine Area," as the geological team weighed withdrawal, geologist Tang Zhongli held firm — famously "obstinate and stubborn" — and insisted on pushing an additional 200 meters into the flank of the dragon-headed mountain. The gamble revealed a vast hidden ore body accounting for roughly 65% of the deposit's total reserves. It became the main force of the whole complex, anchored by 1974 data confirming 520 million tons of ore holding about 5.52 million tons of nickel and 3.41 million tons of copper.

Processing this "Treasure Bowl" — 聚宝盆, an ore body carrying more than twenty companion elements including platinum, palladium and osmium — demanded metallurgy of a high order. In 1993 the company commissioned Asia's first nickel flash smelting furnace. It was paired with an oxygen-rich top-blown furnace, nicknamed the "rough-grain eater," capable of processing 3,000 tons of raw material a day — of which 30–40% could be imported concentrate — while holding dust emissions to a notably low 2–3%.

The rough-grain eater. Flash and top-blown smelting turned Jinchuan's complex sulfide ore into refined metal at industrial scale, extracting a full suite of companion elements from a single feed.

The Treasure Bowl · 聚宝盆

One ore body, more than twenty elements recovered

The commercial genius of the deposit is comprehensive utilization: rather than chasing nickel alone, Jinchuan learned to draw a whole ledger of valuable metals from the same feed — the technical vision Fang Yi championed through the resource-base program.

Refined nickel. Electrolytic nickel cathode of the kind Jinchuan first produced in 1964 — the finished form of the metal whose absence once constrained Chinese industry. Today the "Golden Camel" brand cathode is exported worldwide.

Jinchuan Group in the twenty-first century

With the new millennium, the enterprise reached outward to secure supply across the global chain. In 2001 it restructured into Jinchuan Group Co., Ltd. The signature move of that expansion came in 2011–2012 with the acquisition of Metorex for US$1.32 billion, a deal that carried Jinchuan past global majors and planted its flag in the African copper-cobalt belt.

By 2024 the group produced over 330,000 tons of nickel-containing products a year — including nearly 190,000 tons of electrolytic nickel — alongside roughly 17,000 tons of cobalt and more than 400,000 tons of copper. It ranked 300th on the Fortune Global 500 and 78th on the China Top 500. Its international assets now include Chibuluma in Zambia; Ruashi, Kinsenda and the Musonoi project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and the Bahuerachi copper project in Mexico.

The direction of travel is clear in the capital numbers. Jinchuan's 2023 capital expenditure of about US$236 million — a sharp increase from roughly US$99 million the prior year — marks a decisive acceleration into the battery-materials supply chain. From a heavy-industry smelter, the company has grown into a high-technology supplier for the global energy transition, exporting advances such as its 0.05-millimeter "hand-tear" nickel strip since 2023.

The Jinchuan arc, at a glance

From a single stone to the 2026 horizon

The Jinchuan story is a study in the compounding of two forces: visionary leadership, embodied by Fang Yi, and the persistence of geological pioneers such as Tang Dongfu, Guo Chunshan and Tang Zhongli. From one green stone in the ice, a nation constructed an industrial titan and, with it, a measure of resource security it once lacked.

As Jinchuan advances its "2026 Vision," it aims for world-class profitability while ensuring that a growing share of its products carry high-technology upgrades. With analysts pointing to a projected global nickel deficit in 2026, the role of a technologically advanced, comprehensively-utilizing producer only grows in importance. The "Gold Baby" of the Gobi has matured — ready, as its own vision puts it, to scale the next height of global resource security.

Cast in bronze at the Nickel Capital. A memorial bust of "Comrade Fang Yi" (方毅同志, 1916–1997) stands at Jinchuan Group in Jinchang — raised by the company in 2009 to honor the statesman-scientist whose eight journeys helped build the base. The tribute stands where the desert once did.