888! 888. 888?

Living in Vancouver I have been exposed to Chinese numerology in the form of addresses and floor numbering.  It is serious business.  A building in downtown Vancouver requested and was given the address 888 Beach Avenue so that it could attract more Chinese buyers.  For a brief moment the owners of the building we lived in, with the official address of 907 Beach Avenue, tried to change the address to 909.  They even changed the sign outside of the building by making the seven a nine.   For that period of time (a week at most) Canada Post would not deliver mail to 907 as it did not exist!

The whole reason behind these superstitions is that the pronunciation of the numbers in Chinese sounds like that of certain other words in Chinese.  These things depend on dialects however.  The pronunciation of the number 8 is similar to the word for fortune or propser.  The number 7 is associated with ghosts (nothing to do with pronunciation actually).  The number 9's pronunciation is similar to the word for longlasting.

In twelve days the Summer Olympic Games begin in China.  The date will be August 8, 2008.  The time will be 8:08pm.  08/08/08, 8:08pm.  Being a state where the government still wields a lot of influence on daily lives I thought that the government had again succeeded in bending rules, this time to make this world event start on the day they wanted, not one that the IOC necessarily wanted.  This last assumption was wrong as I have noticed that the Summer Games' Opening Ceremonies seem to fall on any month of the year.....so long as it is summer!  So obviously the Chinese government did not do anything particularly different from the Australians, Americans, Koreans, Canadians, etc.

Having said that I find it interesting how numerology seems to be so important to the Chinese government and to some extent, by extension, the Chinese population.  Clearly there have been some significant changes in China - from outright authoritarian (888!), to today's mix of freedoms and controls and resulting confidence in the world (888), to a hopeful understanding of the consequences of these freedoms and their impacts on our world (888?).

You shall prosper!

We have prospered.

Are we prosperous?

Has this transition happened due to superstitions, numerology and/or luck?  I have my doubts.  Rather I assume it is because of the incredible talent and capability of humans who happen to live in China.  I just hope that they take their improved prosperity and world stature and turn it into a positive for our planet, so that that future generations of Chinese will not wonder whether they truly, and fully, are prosperous.