The Curse of the Fuwas

First I should explain the background. The sound of the Chinese word for eight is the same as the word for "prosperous", so eight is regarded as a lucky number in China.

That's why the Olympics will start at 8pm on 8 August 2008. (Not that the Chinese government is superstitious or anything, you understand...)

Well, according to my Chinese teacher and millions of Chinese bloggers, it's all going horribly wrong.

First there was a bad snowstorm on 25/1 - add the digits together and you get... eight.

Then there was a fatal rail crash in Shandong on 28/4 - multiply 4 by 2 and you get... eight.

The uprising in Tibet started on 14/3 - add the digits and you get... eight.

The earthquake happened on 12/5 - again, add those digits and you get... eight.

Oh, and by the way, it was 88 days before the start of the Olympics.

If that weren't bad enough, there's the Curse of the Fuwas. These are the cutesy, kitsch, cuddly toys and cartoon figures devised as mascots for the Beijing Games; the word Fu Wa means Lucky Doll.

There's Yingying, the Tibetan antelope - clearly a symbol of the unrest in Tibet. Then Huanhuan - living fire, meaning the Olympic torch, which ran into trouble all over the world.

Jingjing is a panda, now even more endangered by the earthquake in its home province of Sichuan. Nini represents a kite from Shandong - you remember, the site of the train crash.

And finally there is Beibei, a fish, symbolising the torrential rain we're currently experiencing, which has led to widespread flooding.

So there you have it. It may not sound like news, but I have to tell you this is the hottest topic in the Chinese blogosphere at the moment.

So hot that the Chinese government - fearing that the populus will be dispirited - wants to ban all further discussion, so the cyber police are deleting as many references as they can find.

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