Chinese are back with their old cultural theories of what is good and what is bad. The superstition that was banned in Mao's era is now finding its place in people's mind. Peter Ford wrote an article in The Christian Science Monitor on the rethinking in Chinese mind over the lucky numbers and ways to ward off evils. (Excerpts)

It is by no means a coincidence that the Games will begin at eight minutes past 8 on the evening of the eighth day of the eighth month of the year 2008. Eight is a lucky number in China, for the simple reason that in Mandarin the word for that digit, "ba," sounds like the word "fa," which means "fortune." "It's not that the government believes this, but it had to choose a date, so why not respect the people's feelings?" explains Xia Xueluan, a sociologist at Peking University.

September 18 is a popular day to open a business because the Chinese word for that date "jiu yi ba" (nine one eight) sounds like the phrase meaning "get rich quick." Beijing hospitals say they are expecting a spike in births that day, according to the state-run press, even if it means an even higher number than normal of C-section deliveries.

The heaviest snowfall in 50 years that paralysed the south of China over the Lunar New Year holiday fell on January 25, ie 1/25. Add one to two to five, suggest the woe-mongers, and you get eight. Same with the date that riots broke out in Tibet – 3/14, they point out. Same again with the date of the Sichuan earthquake – 5/12. To make matters worse, the earthquake struck 88 days before the opening day of the Olympics, which perhaps means double bad luck.

Parents have resorted to the traditional Chinese way of warding off evil spirits – making a lot of noise – and on canned peaches. Why canned peaches? Because the Mandarin word for a peach, "tao" is a homophone for the word that means "escape": Children who eat peaches will thus escape malign supernatural forces.

Was Mao in any way successful in rooting out the "feudal thought"? I suppose people carry these psychology deep within them. No political pressure or ideological brainwashing can change inborn reasoning abilities of human beings. Seems CCP has unofficially accepted this fact.

There are about 30 million people who can barely feed themselves and an additional 60 million who are in “vulnerable poverty” and a huge bulk of rural population that constitutes more than 64 per cent of its 1.3 billion total population that suffer from rural-urban income disparities. A scholar from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security had written in the People’s Daily that 20.53 million urban Chinese now live below the official subsistence line. An earlier report of the Ministry of Civil Affairs stated that an estimated 19.98 million of the China’s 320 million non-farming population were in “extreme poverty”. Premier Wen Jiabao in his interview with the press shortly after the closing session of the 1st session of the 10th NPC revealed that 30 million farmers in China are still living below the poverty line and even those that have been lifted above the poverty line, live at a very low level. He further pointed out that the per capita income of these people is only 625 yuan (US$ 75). Does the PRC still needs to boast about the success it is making in achieving the MDG targets?