But he wants yuan or renmimbi, so that he can pay his workers who have dug the metal out of some hillside in Sichuan.
He said he expected the investments conducted in yuan could help companies hedge risks brought by currency fluctuations.
In the following five years, the business he formed with 300, 000 yuan thrived.
China, he added, had kept the yuan stable even as other currencies depreciated.
Back in 2005, Chuck Schumer said the yuan was 27.5% undervalued, and he demanded a revaluation.
Is he bothered by the peg of the yuan to the dollar, something a good number of countries similarly pursue?
He said China alone would decide where the yuan goes from here.
He makes a maximum of 4, 000 yuan a month, but an apartment for his wife and two children will cost about 250 times that amount.
He also raved about Beijing art duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's life-size sculptures of dinosaurs and rhinoceroses, which stood, like a scattered herd, in several fair booths.
Over the weekend, the head of China's central bank also gave a speech indicating that the yuan could be revalued in the near future (though he blamed international pressure, rather than internal imbalances).
He replaced the black market currency with a stable yuan to stop high inflation and food hoarding.
Paul Cavey at Macquarie has pencilled in a rate of 5.8 yuan to the dollar for 2013, for example, when he expects the current-account surplus to be 3.6% of GDP.
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Last week US the Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said he was considering ways to press China to let the yuan appreciate.
He says he has lost as much as 2.7 million yuan.
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Its president, Feng Jun, founded the company in 1993, when he sold keyboards, taking a profit of only five yuan (then around 90 cents) apiece to encourage distributors to sell lots of them.
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"This will likely lead to greater yuan appreciation, lifting alongside with it the other emerging Asian currencies, " he said.
Yuan Zhongmin, who runs the centre, says that with half his former workforce he can shift 60, 000 cartons every ten hours, compared with 25, 000 previously.
He says Paulson could do more to encourage the Chinese to revalue the yuan, particularly because the dollar has been sinking sharply in global currency markets.
The best guess is that he is pandering to critics in Washington, and that all he really wants is for China to widen the band within which the yuan is allowed to trade, which might produce a modest appreciation.
The rags-to-riches story of Ren Zhengfei, the chief executive, is fleshed out: the son of rural schoolteachers, he left the army in 1983, founding the company with savings of 21, 000 yuan four years later.
"It wouldn't be incorrect that it's on the agenda for the government to cool down the property sector, " he says, but he doesn't believe there's any specific regulation preventing property developers from remitting yuan from offshore into China.
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Mr Snow said on Friday he would be telling Chinese officials in person that Beijing needed to act soon to make the yuan more flexible.
He is also apparently planning to list real estate assets this year in what could be the first yuan-denominated public offering in Hong Kong.
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