Rating: 
Summary: Must have for any trip to China!
Review: This little red book is THE travel guide to have for independent travelers to China! It is well researched, the maps are terrific (better than most maps you can get in China) and the inaccuracies are minor, considering how fast the country is changing. The Chinese I met were impressed by the amount and quality of the information in this book ... they don't seem to have books of similar parallel.
Rating:
Summary: Best Travel Companion in China!
Review: This travel guide helped me when I traveled to China last summer. It included all the essential information that I needed each time I traveled to a new city. What I liked about it was that it listed places to visit and stay according to experiences from previous travelers and thus provided an excellent resource in making decisions. I recommend that anyone travelling to China MUST buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Beware the book
Review: To echo the words of other readers, this is disappointing and out of date.On the second point, bear in mind that many prices have increased (sometimes more than doubled) since this book was published. On the first, try to ignore almost every recommendation on accomodation and food that the guidebook makes. In many locations the majority of listed restaurants are Western and those that are Chinese are poor quality, high priced and seem to be recommended only for having an English menu. Go somewhere else, point, go for pot-luck or learn a little Chinese before you go and you'll enjoy everything much more.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, useful guide with some inaccuracies.
Review: Travelling in China is not easy, to say the least. While my 3-week visit to China was an unforgettable experience, it was laden with all kinds of frustrations. This book makes things a bit easier on the traveler. Its accuracy is good, even though this edition is getting a bit dated -- due to this the information containted in the book was occasionally incorrect. But never fear -- a new edition should be out any day now. One of the people that I was travelling with brought his copy of the Let's Go guide, and we felt that the books complemented each other nicely. However, I felt that the Lonely Planet guide was more detailed and just better overall. The advice is useful and usually fairly precise. However, I did not appreciate how opinionated and cynical the book was when presenting the history of the regions and the description of landmarks. When travelling in a country as different from the western world as China, it is important to keep an open mind -- something that this book has definitely not done. I should note that the book was missing some much-wanted precision. Sometimes if a landmark was pinpointed on the map, the precise address for it was not given in the text. Some landmarks that appeared on the map were not even mentioned in the text. All in all, this is a fairly good and useful book -- I would not describe it as spectacular. I am looking forward to seeing whether the new edition will be a significant improvement over this one.
Rating: 
Summary: DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK
Review: Unless you buy tourist guidebooks to read about gratuitious violence, find another book. My husband bought me this book for Christmas 2 yrs ago to help celebrate our decision to adopt a baby girl from China. Reading Christmas morning, expecting an exciting prelude to our next adventure, we got instead a horrific recount via a sidebar about an unspeakable act of violence to a dog somewhere in China. We have shelves in our library filled with travel books and there will never be a lonely planet guide guide among them.
Rating: 
Summary: Not helpful for lone female travellers
Review: While I was in China this past January visiting the cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'an my sister and I used the Lonely Planet Guide as our main guide to attractions and accomadations. unfortunatly many of the information is inaccurate. The places we looked for were often harder to find than the Lonely Planet showed and sometimes didn't even exist at all. Plus the Lonely Planet is written from primarily a male travellers perspective and the experience of lone female travellers can be vastly different. It's major attribute is finding cheap hotel and hostel accomadation.
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