The time has come for end-of-year lists, and should you have happened to miss the most popular Internet posts this year, you can catch up with ChinaSMACK, which posts a list of 2009's top Chinese Internet memes ...

... and in the same vein, China Hush lists the top ten hottest people (plus a cat) on the Internet in 2009.

At a time when many Chinese apparently feared that the camera would suck out the soul, one of the world's first photojournalists, John Thomson, traveled around the country taking portraits of ordinary people. Danwei has an extract from the introduction to a book of his photography, The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873.

If you're frustrated in your Chinese studies, you might take comfort from this series of posts at Chinayouren, in which Uln attempts to argue that Chinese is the hardest language in the world.

You might not have noticed it while watching Tomorrow Never Dies, Transformers, or Pearl Harbor, but apparently these are among the top ten movies that suck up to China. EastSouthWestNorth translates the silliness.

For those of you who celebrated "turkey day" this week, Useless Tree has a post on what it means to celebrate a Taoist Thanksgiving (Requires proxy).

And CNReviews links to an extremely interesting and lengthy (and now year-old) interview on China Beat about the filming of a Pepsi commercial exploring how ethnicity and nationality are constructed and conceived in China.

For all those pondering the potential of tennis in China after the low turnout for the ATP Champions Tour in Chengdu this month, China Sports Today has an interview touching on these matters with rising tennis star Zhang Shuai.

The dismal state of sex education in China is illustrated by this post on China Hush about the reaction of a small town to a 14-year-old girl who managed to keep her pregnancy secret until she gave birth to the baby in her dorm room.

The disaster movie 2012 has been under the spotlight for its perceived positive, neutral, and negative portrayals of China. But the comments translated by ChinaSMACK hint that people are getting a little bored of nitpicking over anything that might possibly be construed as negative about China's role in big foreign movies.

Naturally, much of the China blogosphere is buzzing about U.S. President Obama's three-day visit to China this week. Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap was deeply unimpressed with the phrase "big supporter of non-censorship", while Sam Crane at the Useless Tree notes the negative coverage and rises to Obama's defense (Requires proxy). China Digital Times and China Beat do a good job of summarizing (requires proxy) media coverage, and the New York Times Room for Debate blog invites opinions from scholars on China about whether or not Obama was too soft in approaching China's leaders on the issue of human rights.

And in an amusing piece (yes, there is one this week!), Evan Osnos of the New Yorker writes about the experiences of the press corps that follow the president on trips abroad.

A hilarious video of popular Chengdu "cop-reality" TV program Tan's Traffic Talk Show with English subtitles by the To Rise From Ashes blog. In it, teasing traffic policeman Tan lectures a 'feizhuliu' hairdresser on hair styles and road safety. The blog also explains key cultural terms. Viewing the blog requires a proxy, but you can see it on Tudou here.

Residents in Kunming protest the death of a tricycle driver at the hands of chengguan, the "city management" law enforcers. Translation and the usual comments railing against chengguan at ChinaSMACK.

After the black-Asian Oriental Angel Lou Jing controversy, China Sports Today clears up misinformation about African-Chinese volleyball player Ding Hui and underscores sport's potential as an avenue to greater tolerance toward mixed-heritage Chinese.

Peking University student Tom shares his and his classmates' thoughts on China's growing role as a "responsible stakeholder" in international affairs over at Six blog.

China Beat looks at how the writings of Lu Xun, hugely influential author, essayist, poet, editor and critic and textbook staple in Chinese schools, have been appropriated and over-simplified by the Communist Party.

Mao statues tend to feature the great helmsman hailing a taxi in a long overcoat, as at Tianfu Square, but it doesn't have to be so. Danwei reports on a new, youthful, long-locked Mao statue in Changsha, capital of his native Hunan province.

And have you ever wondered what a sex festival is like in China? Adam Minter from Shanghai Scrap stumbles upon one in Guangzhou and calls it a "seriously cold shower."

Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.

China Study Group reports on a group of migrant workers who protested at Chengdu's Regal Master Plaza claiming that they are collectively owed 30 million RMB.

China Beat has a selection of links relating to the laowai's laowai, Peter Hessler, including early reviews of his new book, Country Driving.

China Geeks explains some of the reasons they regularly post about mistakes and bias in western media reports about China.

Chinamusicradar interviews Beijing indie-music photographer Matthew Niederhauser about the hype surrounding the capital's bands.

ChinaSMACK summarizes reactions to the "schoolgirl beating" video that made a splash on the internet this week.

Danwei features an excerpt from Apologies Forthcoming, a new collection of short stories by writer and Inside-out blogger Xujun Eberlein. Plus, Danwei shares the news that smoking is to be banned in Sichuan's hospitals.

And, if you don't know your Li Bingbing from your Fan Bingbing, you might want to check out eChinacities list of China's hottest female stars, a follow-up to last week's hottest male stars.

Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.

China Study Group looks at alternative food networks in China, and in particular an organic co-operative in Anlong that delivers organically farmed produce to Chengdu residents.

China Hush reposts a beautifully shot photo essay on pollution in China and finds out that the prostitute with AIDS story from last week was a cruel hoax by a jealous ex-lover.

Danwei shares a foreigner's account of life in a Beijing jail.

ChinaSMACK features a post from ESWN about present-day university students' responses to the legend of the White-Haired Girl and Evil Landlord: "For some, this means that the sympathy that used to exist for poor and oppressed people in the 1940's has been replaced by blind adoration of money."

Aimee Barnes conducts long technical interview with two foreign experts on energy in China.

And Glen on the Lost Laowai blog takes issue with the idea of "real China."

Danwei features the introduction of and an extract from the recently republished memoir by "princess" Der Ling who recounts her two years spent in the Forbidden City serving Empress Cixi. (Requires proxy)

Matt Schiavenza links to a The National article about two Jewish Americans, both called Sidney, who lived in China during and after the civil war. Coincidentally, the New Yorker's Letter From China blog features a short interview with one of the Sidneys about his views on China today.

China Beat interviews Ole Schell, director of a new documentary about the Chinese entrepreneurs who competed on the wildly popular TV game show Win in China.

James Fallows' blog embeds a video from the Atlantic's "Doing Business in China" series in which a handful of Chinese high-flyers are asked a surprisingly tricky question: What is communism?

China Sports Today writes about the medal-fixing scandal afflicting the national games. China Hush also has a full translation of an Sina interview with the informer who has made the accusations.

In what is possibly the saddest and most 'lei' 雷 (shocking) story on ChinaSMACK (and there's a lot of competition), a prostitute shares all about her sexual health, her contraction of AIDS, as well as all the phone numbers of her clients.

And in a short post, ChinaGeeks looks at a fellow who has recently been in the news, Mao's grandson Mao Xinyu, and the content of his popular blog.

Inspired by the question of why China's peasants didn't revolt during the three-year famine of 1959 to 1961, Inside-Out China publishes a transcript of an interview with Chongqing resident Mr. Chen, at the time a local government worker, who describes the shocking conditions he witnessed in Sichuan during the Great Leap Forward. (Requires proxy)

Danwei TV interviews author Wang Gang about his experiences in the Cultural Revolution and why nobody else wants to talk about it.

In a thoughtful post at the Granite Studio, Jeremiah Jenne argues that in order to explain the apparent gap between Chinese and Western attitudes toward state control, we need to consider what we fear the most, not what we value the most.

ChinaSMACK translates a Chinese netizens' sometimes witty, sometimes not responses to the hypothetical question, "What would happen if the aliens in the movie District 9 landed in China?"

Be a hater. It's not just you who despises the squeaky voices and cheesy lines on Chinese TV commercials. ChinaHush provides a lowdown on 2009's top 10 worst offenders, as voted by Chinese netizens. "And my, over the years, constipation is gone, too."

Shanghaiist reports on the latest stupid things Jackie Chan said on CCTV.

Fool's Mountain examines why China hasn't produced (m)any laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the state of writing in China. (Requires proxy)

Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.

Bought a new mobile recently? Over at Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter links to his own Foreign Policy piece about South China's "digital dumps" and the volume of domestic e-waste that ends up there--which should encourage you to think twice about selling your dead electronics to the neighborhood scrap-hunter.

This Friday's fifty 5 introduces five of China's popular journalist bloggers: Good reading, especially if you can read Chinese and want to get sucked into the Chinese-language blog world.

Chinayouren tells an apparently true and rather entertaining story set in a Spanish airport about an averted plane crash, a Chinese mother-and-sun duo, and the mysterious ducks that tie everything together.

The China Media Project analyzes BBC's and AFP's lazy reporting, in which the two news giants publish articles based almost exclusively on information in a China Daily piece about media rules in Shenzhen.

China Hearsay offers a take on the political reasoning behind the U.S.'s decision to slap a tariff on tires imported from China.

Long reading from Fool's Mountain: A translation of a post recounting Deng Xiaoping interpreter and academic Zhang Weiwei's challenge to other scholars to name a country that democratized before modernizing, questioning the value of democracy before economic development.
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And finally, China Geeks excerpts a Times of India interview with "the only senior Buddhist leader recognized by Beijing, the Tibetans, and India," Karmapa Lama Trinley Dorje, 24, who talks about the emotional therapy of playing war video games.
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Fran likes surfing the China blogosphere, and every Sunday she shares her picks of the week with GoKunming readers.