As a sustainable model of modern manufacturing industry, green manufacturing is one of the essential solutions of the manufacturing environment pollution problems. Green cutting technology is the base and key of green manufacturing and will be the inevitable trend of cutting technology. High speed machining technology is a kind of the advanced manufacturing technologies which have superiorities as low cost, high efficiency, good processing quality and are suitable for machining thin walled workpieces and difficult-to-cut materials, and the relative problem has attracted scholars' attention from all over the world. From the perspective of green manufacturing, research results of high speed machining hardened steels are reviewed, including cutting force, cutting temperature, selection and optimization of processing parameters and machining quality, and conclude that high speed cutting is one of the key technologies in implementing green manufacturing and cleaner production. Finally, its future works of the research are discussed.