I'm going to be moving to a smallish town in China next month, perhaps I'll be far enough away from things to be able to see some stars.

50 stars is a bit small a number for a small town, but then again I haven't bothered to count the number that are visible locally.

We need to build an array on the moon, free of pollution/atmosphere/interfering light and beam the feed back to earth.....and possibly charge regular people to look through it on their PCs....Who's with me?

It may just be my eyesight that's the problem, I'm not particularly sure. As far as China, I've heard that there's still a rather thick smog over the country, but hopefully it's thinned out enough that you can get some good stargazing.

I'm not sure what size a small town really is, but I'll be in Yangshuo County, the population of the county is about 300k, but I could very well end up in a smaller town than that.

I've found that around here we have a population of about double that an I can pretty much always see at least a dozen stars in the sky without really counting. Granted it's far fewer than I used to see

Wait, you can use telescopes to look at the sky?

Never thought of them that way ....

There are rumors that some people use telescopes to locate their todgers when a magnifying glass isn't powerful enough.

Preparation is everything!

Sit in the dark for a couple of hours before-hand to allow your eyes to adapt.
Never use a normal flashlight to read your charts/notes - get a torch/laser that has a red filter (or green).

If you're a complete novice, joining a local Astronomy group is a good idea for at least a few weeks - they're very friendly to noobs, and often allow them to look through members' scopes at famous objects, and can offer advice for the best places and scopes to buy. Check local papers for group meets! Hell, that even goes for semi-experienced amateurs, too.

Oh Yangshuo is beautiful - I think you'll be able to see a lot of stars there when away from the main streets (weather permitting). I've been to Yangshuo town a few times (always full of foreign tourists but if you get away from the main streets then you can be quite secluded).
Yangshuo town itself has a few bars and cafes and the touristy shops (you can bargain on the prices so do so if you buy from there). Guilin city isn't far and has everything else if you can't find it locally.
Even Yangshuo town is small so if you're in another part of the county then it'll be very small I would think :)

I may end up in an even smaller town that's just in Yangshuo County. Which now that I think about it would probably be a good reason to look into getting a proper map of the stars as I rarely ever get the opportunity to see more than just the largest ones. I can usually see the Big Dipper and some of the more prominent stars. As well as Mars and Venus, but it's really disappointing how one doesn't really need a flashlight at any time of the day or night to navigate around here.

Consider buying a second-hand one. These things are expensive, so people who upgrade their telescope tend to sell their old one. Check out some astronomy forums for classifieds.

Everyone is right you should buy a reasonable set of binoculars first, they will set you back a lot less than any telescope that is worth having and if you don't take to stargazing then you still have something you can use for other things. If you get the bug then you could consider getting a decent scope after a while, and I bet you will still use your 'nocs even then.

QC mentioned planetarium software, get a copy of stellarium from www.stellarium.org, it's free and its worth the price. Ooops Just noticed that Trollum has already mentioned this!

The best advice you can get is here -> http://sirpatrickmoore.com/beginners_guide/equipment.php

Newtonian telescopes are not that expensive. If you don't need computerized tracking you can get really good 14cm or so Celestron around $200 with some basic tripod and eyepiece. If your budget goes above $300 you may consider small Maksutov telescope from Celestron or Meade -- while those have smaller mirrors they are more compact and generally more fun to play with until you learn the stuff. It is also easier to get into astrophotography with this type.
Look around for deals -- quite often stores throw in extra eyepieces or prisms.
A pair of binoculars is also a good recommendation for a beginner but the magnification is not going to be anywhere near a telescope. When choosing binoculars look for bigger aperture -- it is more important than magnification. Something like 12x50 will do great but even 8x40 is quite acceptable.

You mean like Hubble (visible), James Webb (infrared - not up yet), Compton (gamma ray), Spitzer (infrared), Chandra (x-ray), and Newton (x-ray) telescopes? :) I have a hazy recollection of NASA occasionally running contests letting average people (or perhaps more accurately I should say amateur astronomers) choose the next image of a telescope - but I can't remember which telescope (terrestrial or Hubble) they did that with and I may just be completely misremembering.

For ground telescopes, adaptive optics to correct for atmosphere distortions have made significant improvements, though I'm sure having adaptive optics is still not as good as having a true space telescope and, as in space telescopes, it's likewise not available for the everyman (requires a lot of computation, expensive imagery systems, and expertise in the correction).

BTW, there is also the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA, which often has great images.

I would quite like a motorised telescope with pc interface... yeah, that'd be nice.