That has not only fed a growing population, but it has led to better nutrition and health, higher rural incomes, falling poverty rates, and more labor available to other sectors to drive Chinese economic development.

There are many factors that accounted for China’s recent green revolution. One of the most significant is its commitment to agricultural innovation and the work of people like Professor Yuan Longping. A crop scientist at Hunan Agricultural University, Professor Yuan developed hybrid rice varieties that increased crop yields over 20 percent.

China’s continuing advances in rice could be of enormous benefit to millions of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom today are barely growing enough to feed their families and who’ll face more difficult weather conditions in the decades ahead.

Since 2008, Our foundation’s supported work by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and others to develop new varieties of rice that – when crossed with domestic varieties in countries like Senegal, Tanzania, Rwanda – will result in high-yielding, stress-tolerant crops that will boost farmer yields and income. But to feed the entire planet, we need to do even more.

One of the most exciting efforts is research by Chinese scientists to supercharge the basic process of photosynthesis itself. This would significantly increase crop yields while reducing the demand for irrigation and fertilizer.

We are also supporting research by Chinese scientists to improve the health of livestock, which plays a vital role in food security and the rural economy of developing countries. We are working with the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Agriculture to promote sustainable agricultural development throughout Africa.

That brings me to what I think of as China’s third global opportunity: energy innovation. China is already one of the world leaders in renewable energy. And it recently announced that it will spend $360 billion on renewable power sources by 2020. This will pay off handsomely for China domestically, and it’s a great, long-term business opportunity.

There are challenges: sorting out the right mix of technologies, managing the reliability in the new large transmission grid. All of these will be needed to manage in a very complex way to meet the growing energy needs.

One element of the system would be the next-generation of nuclear technology. This, for generation, can be dramatically safer and substantially cheaper and solve a lot of the challenges with today’s nuclear energy. I work with a company, TerraPower, that is partnering with China National Nuclear Corporation and other Chinese companies to provide one way to make this a reality.