Feature
Superstitious minds
by Matt Nippert
Kiwi Olympians are considered lucky to have ended up in tower block 8 in the village. Do superstitions still count?
If China could choreograph the stars, celestial bodies would probably be lined up in the sky to form figure-eights at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. This year’s largest sporting event begins at eight minutes and eight seconds after 8.00pm on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008.
“The organisers, the IOC, wanted to have the Games in September. The weather’s better, it would be cooler,” says Dave Currie, New Zealand’s chef de mission at the Olympics. “But China said no. They’d waited for a millennium to have those eights lined up.”
Kingsley Edney, a New Zealand doctoral student with the University of Melbourne who is in Beijing looking into the political symbolism behind the 29th Olympiad for his thesis, says eight is a traditionally lucky number. Edney, fluent in Mandarin, says the auspicious overtones of eight come from its similarity in sound to the phrase “prosperity”. In contrast, the number four sounds like “death”.
“China didn’t bid to host the Olympics in 2004 – four obviously not being quite so good as eight,” says Edney. “What’s been interesting this year is that the lucky number eight is being turned around.”
Various disasters and calamities have befallen China, and some people who subscribe to numerology are concluding that eight is a common and ominous thread.
“At the start of the year there was a massive snowstorm down south, the biggest in 50 years,” says Edney. The storm, which killed more than 100 people, started on January 25. “People started saying: ‘One plus two plus five equals eight. That’s strange.’”
More strangeness was to come. Next, protests over the status of Tibet rocked China and sparked scuffles during the official international Olympic torch relay. Riots started in Lhasa on March 14. “People went: ‘Three plus one plus four, that also equals eight. Something’s going on.’”
Yet more surface-level spookiness came in May when an earthquake struck the Sichuan region, killing 70,000 and leaving nearly five million homeless. The quake, eight on the Richter scale, struck on May 12. Says Edney, “People were saying: ‘Five plus one plus two is eight. This is pretty bad.’
“There have been all these rumours flying around on the internet about how all these catastrophes are connected to the number eight. So, now people are saying, ‘Well, perhaps eight’s not going to be a lucky number this year.’”
This grass-roots re-reading of the number eight has drawn the attention of the Chinese authorities, says Edney. “Generally those internet posts have been deleted, or ‘harmonised’ as it is termed, but it hasn’t stopped most average young technologically aware Chinese knowing about these things. It’s definitely a pop-culture phenomenon.”
Edney recalls buying a cellphone in Shanghai and being charged different rates depending on how many eights he wanted in his new phone number. Closer to home, anyone calling the cellphone of National’s Shanghai-born MP, Pansy Wong, needs to dial three eights in a row.
Building construction doesn’t escape numerological quirks, either, says Edney. Just as many Western buildings lack a 13th floor because the number is considered unlucky, several hotels in Shanghai lack a fourth floor. Chinese-financed developments abroad can have similar eccentricities.
Edney recalls that a Melbourne apartment building he lived in did not have any fours: “It didn’t have a fourth floor, and didn’t have any apartments with fours in them, either. They skipped straight from 33 to 35.”
But whether state-sanctioned or not, superstitious beliefs have been shown on occasion to have a small but significant effect on life and death. A study published in the British Medical Journal analysed the deaths by cardiac failure between 1973 and 1998 of Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans on the 4th of the month and on other days (Japanese also tend to consider four unlucky).
Researchers found a statistically significant increase in deaths on the 4th and theorised that this was most likely due to a “Hound of the Baskervilles effect”: people’s anxiety about death hastening their own demise. But the effect is disputed, with one professor of economics finding no spike and concluding: “It seems implausible that Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans are scared to death by the number four.”
Sometimes superstition can have a murderous effect on behaviour. In Chinese astrology, the year of the Fire Horse, which occurs once every six decades, symbolises ill-fortune – particularly for women born that year. Prominent British psychologist Richard Wiseman’s new book, Quirkology, cites a Japanese study that showed a 2.5% decrease in the birth rate during 1966, the last year of the Fire Horse.
More chillingly, the study also showed a statistically significant increase in the neonatal mortality rate for girls born in 1966 – but not for boys. The study concluded that Japanese girls were being “sacrificed to a folk superstition”.
And Marc Wilson, a senior lecturer in psychology at Victoria University and an expert in superstitions, reckons belief can influence more than behaviour. He points to another study tracking Chinese astrological birth signs and death by specific organ failure.
Illnesses are related to different astrological signs, and after analysing 28,000 Chinese-American death records, the researchers found that in 13 of 15 organ-related illnesses, those fated by astrology to be more likely to die of a specific illness died of that ailment statistically earlier than those with another birth sign. “How’s that for the power of superstition?” says Wilson.
Page 1 
