Prof. Chu-phay Yap returned to China in the 1950s to help the country solve its strategic need for steel. Yap, who proposed using chemical engineering theories to strengthen metallurgical processes, established the Institute of Chemical Metallurgy (ICM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1958. In the 1970s, ICM – then led by Prof. Mooson Kwauk and Prof. CHEN Jiayong – promoted the broad application of chemical engineering theory to fields like resources and the environment, energy, and material manufacturing, etc. In the 1980s, this effort extended to fostering interactions between chemical engineering and biotechnology. In the 1990s, ICM strengthened its research in engineering chemistry and, by the 21st century, ICM had made process engineering a key research field and placed spatiotemporal multiscale structural studies at its core. In 2001, ICM was renamed the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE), thus completing a historic leap from focusing on chemical metallurgy to becoming a leader in process engineering. Over the past decade, in order to develop a green, intelligent, high-end process industry, IPE has brought together basic research and industrial application by combining research institutes, institutes of higher learning and production. In 2019, IPE took the lead in establishing the CAS Innovation Academy for Green Manufacturing, thus shouldering the historic task of developing revolutionary technologies in green manufacturing.