A guy decides to research and drink every single kind of tea in China, one per week, and blog about it. If you like Chinese teas and want to know more about them, this is a great project to check out: The Taobao Tea Trail

A journalist with over seven years experience in China is taking a six-month journey through rural China to document the lives of China’s “other billion” — the Chinese who aren’t born, raised and educated in relatively developed coastal cities: “I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. … China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.”

The China Beat provides a helpful summary of a dystopian novel critical of the way things are in China: “The novel can be read … as a realistic presentation of the shocking darkness behind the dazzling economic miracle created by the Chinese model. It also proposes that China’s younger generations suffer from the consequences of collective amnesia and historical half-truths… The book can also be read … as an allegory of the modern nation-state. Taking China as a case study, by questioning the morality and political legitimacy of the Chinese model of development, the novel is intended to lead us to the potential catastrophes that a modern nation-state may bring about if it is out of its people’s control.”

The Ministry of Environmental Protection acknowledged on Monday that the first half of 2010 had the worst air quality since 2005.

The good doctor in Beijing recently conducted a new air pollution survey around the city, comparing indoor and outdoor pollution, and the effects of things like air purifiers.

There’s also an air pollution Q&A with another doctor in Beijing about the actual effects on healthy people and when and where to exercise.

NPR has an on-going series on the apparent rise of religious belief in China.

While acknowledging the role of foreign Christians in agitating for positive social reform and assisting Chinese resistance to foreign imperial aggression, and while claiming “that there is much cheap argument in the narrow nationalistic attack which sees in the Christian missionary an agent of imperialist aggression”, Dr. Hu Shi predicts in a 1927 editorial that nationalism, rationalism, and humanism will take root in China and successfully kill off Christianity within China.

A reflective review of Peter Hessler’s latest book Country Driving:
“For many Chinese, their biggest concern has always been poverty. They believe that all their problems would float away if only they had money. When success does strike — and for the first time in their life they don’t need to worry about money — many Chinese are still anxious and lost and don’t know why. They are just unhappy. In Hessler’s account of Wei Ziqi, I see my family, my relatives and my friends all facing a similar predicament … Hessler does a good job capturing both the anxiety and opportunity of this transitional period…

“There is a myth, one believed by many Chinese, that foreigners do not and cannot understand China. This book shows that this myth is simply nonsense.”

A piece translated from the Chinese internet argues that grass-roots level government officials are more victims than perpetrators when it comes to China’s drinking/banquet culture:

“Official reception is currently an “important task” for grass-roots level cadres. Some unit chiefs spoke candidly [on this topic]: “If we didn’t have to wine and dine people, work wouldn’t be so hard.” In other words, grass-roots level cadres are fed up with the excesses of official reception.”

The China Beat profiles the late on Joan Hilton, an American who left to join the Communist Revolution in 1948 and never returned: “She was shocked to learn that tens of thousands of Japanese were killed by the bomb which she had helped to make. She didn’t want to spend her life figuring out how to kill people, Hinton said, so she went to China to help them… and settled into pastoral obscurity outside Xi’an, where their two sons and a daughter learned only Chinese.

“In 2002, Rob Gifford of National Public Radio asked Hinton if she regretted either the hard times during the Cultural Revolution or the disappointment of the post-Mao reforms. No, she replied, with an incredulous, almost querulous laugh — she had taken part in the two greatest events of the 20th century, the invention of the atomic bomb and the Chinese Revolution. “Who could ask for anything more than that?””

What’s the official Chinese view of the internet? That all depends on who’s listening. “How the Chinese Authorities View the Internet: Three Narratives” neatly sources and outlines three distinct official views of the internet: one for the Chinese public, one for the foreign media, and the government’s own internal version.