Stock markets go into freefall, banks totter on the verge of insolvency, governments open their vaults in a bid to bail out the world's financial system.

Hardly the optimum time to venture into a new category of high-risk emerging industries, one might think. Or is it?

Wind power, solar energy, and nuclear power, now the environmentally-friendly investments battlefields in China, have taken a battering that even outstrips that meted out to the conventional energy industries.