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I am a U.S. citizen and want to travel to China. This website claims to be official http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ but it is not .cn and it is not .gov so I don't know if it is official and if I should trust it.
Is this website legit? Should I rely on it to apply?
What is the right way to apply?
Yes, that's the official site, and the advice it gives you has a high probability of being correct. As evidence, here it is on a a list of embassy websites served from www.state.gov.
Note that the Chinese embassy wouldn't have a .gov top level domain since it isn't a US government institution. It also appears that Chinese embassies generally use an address which corresponds to the host nation, rather than a .cn one, eg. the UK webpage is at http://www.chinese-embassy.org.uk/eng/ and the French one at http://www.amb-chine.fr/fra/.
Yeah, http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/
is the official website of China Embassy and you can fully rely on it.
The above link tells you the full details of your last question and the method of applying for a Chinese visa.
While the website is legitimate they are bad at keeping it up to date and free from errors.
In practice most people get Chinese visas through visa service agencies. China doesn't offer mail service to Americans for visas so you either have to go to the consulate in person or have someone do it for you--and for most people that means a visa agency.
Unlike the website, the visa agencies do keep up with what the current rules are and they know what the consulate will actually expect.
