Nine percent of China's gross national income is lost to environmental problems.

In northern China, air pollution is responsible for shortening people's lives by five and a half years. Nine percent of China's gross national income is lost to environmental problems.

None of this is surprising to a Westerner, because perhaps no aspect of China is more notable to those of us in the West than its environmental issues.

Here's what is surprising: China is the world leader in green manufacturing. It's true, and I am not alone in believing that China will continue to lengthen its lead in green manufacturing over the next quarter century.

In a report for the World Wildlife Fund, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants write that "China is the largest clean-tech country in absolute terms," with 30 percent year-on-year sales growth.

China's industrial firms have earned almost 105,000 ISO 14001 certificates, which map out effective environmental management systems. The country whose businesses have the next closest number of certificates (Italy) has only 24,662. The US and Germany have fewer than 8,000 each.

For China, green manufacturing is also viewed as a way to catapult its manufacturing sector ahead of global rivals, such as the US and Germany, in both sophistication and profitability. This will help China continue to grow and create new jobs for years into the future.

Going green is not only a solution to environmental degradation, it can also extend China's spectacular run of economic growth.

Climate change, for example, is not just a source of worry. It's also a source of opportunity, as one official document puts it, "to speed up economic restructuring as well as the transformation of China's mode of development and hasten forth a new industrial revolution."