The Chinese are normally very superstitious people, but with the international spotlight on them and the Olympics just around the corner, the prophecies of divining rods and tea leaves are getting more and more play around the country.One theory suggests that the Fuwa, the Olympic mascots, have been omens for China's bad luck this year. To wit:
- Jingjing, the panda, represents Sichuan, the homeland of the animal and, coincidentally, the province just hit by the earthquake.
- Huanhuan, a flame, stands for the Olympic torch. It was, of course, the torch relay and the subsequent protests that brought China so much negative publicity in April.
- Yingying is an antelope that lives exclusively in Tibet, where riots broke out in March.
- Nini is a kite and is meant to represent the province of Shandong, where kites were reputedly invented. It's also the site of a train crash that killed 70 in January.
- Beibei is the key to this. It (he/she?) is a sturgeon fish, and Chinese sturgeons are found only in the Yangtze River. Will that, then, be the site of the next disaster (and possibly even during the Olympics)? Or is the water association a link to the massive snow storms that already hit China this winter? Has the worst already happened or is worse about to come?
Yet another theory relates to the Chinese love of the number 8 (in Cantonese, 8 sounds like the word for 'fortune'). The snow storms struck on January 25th (1/25, and 1+2+5=8), the Tibet riots broke out on March 14th (3/14; 3+1+4=8), and the earthquake happened on May 12th (5/12; 5+1+2=8). May 12th was also the 88th day before the Opening Ceremonies, which are scheduled to start on August 8th, 2008, at 8:08pm.
It's a good time to be a conspiracy theorist in China.
1 comment:
Wow apparently I haven't visited this site in a while. Probably a good thing. At least this way I only noticed your "diving" rod mishap now. It's a divining rod.
Now on to the next typo!
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