Photos via the BBC It's one of the (if not the) rarest flower in the world: the Middlemist's Red exists in only two known locations: a greenhouse in the UK, and a garden in New Zealand. Imported to Britain two hundred years ago from China, back when flowers where a luxury item, it has since been exterminated in its original homeland. And now the Middlemist is blooming again--nice looking flower, right?...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Flickr Since 2000, China has reportedly purchased 141 rare white rhinos from South Africa--an amount that has drawn the suspicion from conservationists that the animals aren't being used for friendly purposes. Instead, it is believed that the rhinos are being farmed on wildlife reserves for the sole purpose of Read the full story on TreeHugger

Rust in Peace, and I don't mean the Megadeth album. Photo: Flickr, CC The Sale to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines Fell Through GM has been trying to sell its Hummer brand for about two years now. It has a preliminary deal with a Chinese company, but that collapsed when they couldn't get approval form the Chinese government. There's no solid timetable yet for the closure of the Hummer division, and there's always the possibility that new bids will emerge, but after this long, and considering that Hummers aren't exactly s...Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Simply Lori Ann Brian recently told us about how China's water pollution problems are probably twice as bad as official government statistics show. Part of that is due to agricultural run-off from excessive fertilizer use. But water isn't the only thing being polluted by too much fertilizer. Mongabay highlights a new article in Science which d...Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Joe via flickr. With all the recent brouhaha over inaccurate and since retracted statements in the 2007 IPCC climate change report about the speed with which Himalayan glaciers are melting, a recent series of posts over at China Dialogue is particularly poignant. In it Professor Kenneth Hewitt, research associate at the Read the full story on TreeHugger